juicy gossip this side of the strait:
olympic mascot curse
beijing olympics has five cute mascots. china has five calamities befall it this year.
one mascot is a shandong kite. china had one nasty train collision in SHANDONG.
one mascot is a tibetian antelope. china had the tibet riots.
one mascot is fire. china had the torch grabbing incident.
one mascot is a panda (from sichuan). the nasty earthquake was in sichuan.
one mascot is water. chin ais having its worst flooding in 50 years.
i guess you can be thankful that they didn’t use taiwan binglan for #6.
[quote]That and similar posts have disappeared quickly this week. China’s censors monitor the Internet carefully and remove any posts deemed inflammatory or not in line with government policy.
Major calamities, earthquakes in particular, were viewed in imperial China as a sign that a dynasty had lost the mandate of Heaven.[/quote]
No kidding! I take it with a grain of salt and contained glee -not at the calamities, of course, but at the official fear of what their happening would mean.
