Houston Community News >> Party Worries as Feng Shui Gains Ground
10/2/2007-- For foreign news
reporters in Hong Kong, a much- celebrated annual ritual is their Lunar New Year
visit to a fung shui master. Using his mystical
powers, the geomancer will peer into the future. He will then tell overseas
audiences about the world's fortunes in the coming twelve months. Another
time-honored tradition is the soothsayer's first piece of advice. More often
than not this will be an urgent demand to tackle Hong Kong's foremost problem by
demolishing the headquarters of the Bank of China.
The triangular patterning of the skyscraper looks like pyramids, the Cantonese
word for which is kam te chap. This is bad because it sounds like kam chap, or
the name for urns containing the remains of the dead. And the building's
"chopstick" masts resemble incense sticks burnt to honor dead ancestors. The
whole structure, the argument goes, is a dagger pointed at the city's heart,
with sharp edges radiating destructive energy toward Legco and other neighboring
buildings. It is a geomancer's nightmare.
For those who know the people who built the Bank of China the message is clear:
a middle finger raised skyward to symbolize communist hatred of
fung shui, and all the rest of the superstitious
mumbo jumbo the Middle Kingdom has piled up in its five thousand years of
history.
In the years leading up to the handover it looked like communism might triumph.
This year, however, a different reality has been emerging. Not only has
scientific Marxism failed to banish humbug from its Hong Kong hideout, but
superstition from the SAR has crossed the border, conquered China, and now looks
like its on the way to taking over the party itself.
Earlier this summer, a study published by the China National School of
Administration concluded that over half of the officials it surveyed had some
belief in their country's rich heritage of occult practices. Later in May,
Southern Weekly ran an equally alarming story. Government officials, the popular
investigative newspaper claimed, have overtaken businessmen to become the most
important group of customers for mainland fung shui masters.
This news has provoked a furious debate. As with Grigori Rasputin in the court
of Russia's Tsar Nicholas, does the influence of shamans over civil servants
imperil the nation? Or has China reached a level of development where hocus
pocus need no longer be a menace to good government?
These days, governmental disapproval of mumbo jumbo remains enshrined in the
Eight Honors and Eight Disgraces. Hu Jintao promulgated this set of commandments
last year as a new moral yardstick to measure the work, conduct and attitude of
party officials. After loving the motherland and serving the people, No3 on the
list is: Follow science; discard superstition.
Yet deep-rooted traditions do not die easily. To take the case of
fung shui, in the mid-1980s Taoist geomancy
re-entered Guangdong from Hong Kong and Macau. Over the same period it was
brought from Taiwan to Fujian by businessmen and practitioners coming to see
relatives.
In the 1990s, fung shui spread north and inland,
while younger enthusiasts inside China were fishing out old manuals and teaching
themselves.
Fung shui practices are now common in second and even third-tier cities,
although practitioners do not advertise their work openly. Typically, they
describe themselves as information consultancies.
Zhang Lipang is a customer, a real-estate agent in Hebei's provincial capital of
Shijiazhuang. This month he paid a fung shui master 25,000 yuan (HK$25,860) to
choose the location of his new company office and advise on the layout of its
interior. Seventy percent of his peers in the city now do the same, he reckons.
Ten years ago almost none did.
"If I use fung shui, I get more customers and my
employees have better health," he says. The benefits are obvious.
Alongside the trend in China's general population, superstition has made inroads
into the party itself. A new survey, Investigation into Scientific Literacy
Among County-level Government Officials, published in May by the China National
School of Administration, provides an insight into how far this is happening.
The survey questioned more than 900 county- level officials from 17 provinces
and autonomous regions, nearly all with a university or college education.
Although China has a much richer tradition of occult practices than most
countries, only four were covered in the questionnaire: divination, physiognomy
(used to judge a person's character from their facial features), astrology and a
popular method of dream interpretation described in the ancient manual Zhou
Gong's Book of Auspicious and Inauspicious Dreams.
The survey also asked the question: "If an [occult] method of prediction
foretells a great disaster befalling you, what will you do? Ignore it, consult a
relevant manual or friend, or follow the method of avoiding the disaster given
by the clairvoyant?"
Nearly a quarter of respondents said they would take heed of the prediction.
Only 47.6 percent answered that they would ignore it and did not believe in
divination or any of the four named practices to boot. No sooner had it appeared
than the NSA's report sparked a torrent of media debate.
Cases cited by mainland media to show the peril now facing China include Hu
Jianxue in Shandong province. A fung shui master from Beijing advised the party
secretary of Taian city that the absence of a new bridge was all that was
stopping him from becoming China's vice- premier. Hu then changed the plans of a
provincial expressway. He rerouted it across a reservoir to include his bridge.
That was before he was arrested and given a suspended death sentence for
corruption in 1996.
Another publicized case was that of the vice governor of Hebei province, Cong
Fukui, who fell under the spell of a peasant from Jilin province who claimed she
had clairvoyant powers. With this new mentor behind him, Cong bullied local
businessmen and subordinates into handing over some 17 million yuan in donations
for the erection of a Buddhist temple.
The researcher who conducted the NSA's May survey was Dr Cheng Peng. She says
that government officials go to fung shui masters or Taoist priests with two
main demands. Firstly, she says, they want promotion to a higher level of
office. Secondly, they want protection to prevent discovery of corruption and
misdeeds.
Changxuan Chuliang can confirm the first of these. He is the principal fung shui
master of his own Beijing-based Jinmingyi Consultancy Company. He is also the
son of Changxuan Lichen, one of the mainland's top-ranked geomancers before he
retired this year to live as a Buddhist monk.
Government officials, says Changxuan, now make up 30 percent of his clients.
They seek more benefit for the people, he says. The higher their rank, the more
people will be influenced by their vision. If they are moral, then he says he is
eager to help them because the positive consequences will be greater.
One example he gives is of an official who was in charge of a county office of
the Ministry of Electricity in Shandong
province when he came for consultation in 2001. The official was advised to
reposition his ancestors' tombs in a certain way. He did this, and within 100
days received a call from Beijing; a
miraculous promotion to work at the ministry's main office.
When going about his work, Changxuan junior certainly looks and acts the part.
He dresses in a plain Tang jacket and, as a strict Buddhist, eats only
vegetarian food. He vehemently denies that fung shui can be called superstition
or a black art. As a science, he says, it is of equal validity to anything the
West has come up with.
Ren Jianming, the vice director of Tsinghua University's Anti-Corruption and
Governance Research Center, which is the mainland's No1 anti- corruption
think-tank, worries that fung shui creates new avenues for corruption by means
of gift consultations made by businessmen to cadres.
Fung shui is already widely used by government officials. Given this reality,
the NSA's report seems to be prompting some kind of formal debate. This
discussion is similar to the one that has already taken place for Confucius and
religion. Confucianism these days is positively encouraged among cadres.
Religious faith is tolerated as long as party members worship in private.
Contributed by The Standard