Monkey business in 2004
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A woman reaches to touch a stone monkey for good luck at the Baiyunguan Taoist temple in Beijing.
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BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- The Year of the Monkey, Chinese soothsayers predict, will bring a stock market boom, a freer yuan currency -- and a hefty dose of political chaos.
Like the temperamental animal from which the Lunar New Year starting on Thursday borrows its sign, 2004 will keep everyone on their toes with revolution and change, they say.
"It's always a naughty year with the monkey around," Xu Kun, a glamorous Beijing-based adviser to tycoons and politicians, told Reuters as she aimed an eight-pointed compass, the basic tool of her trade.
"With luck flowing to the northeast, stock markets, especially China's stock market, will rally," she said with a confidence backed by thousands of years of collective observation into relationships between the Earth and the heavens.
Brought to mankind by a mythical horse and tortoise, the Chinese fortune-telling system codified in the "Book of Changes" or "I Ching" was banned as heretical and nearly stamped out during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution.
But defiant devotees on the mainland and millions of followers around the world have kept alive the ancient art, making the 12-year animal cycle as mainstream as Chinese takeout.
Just as common is the sale of racy red underwear in the Chinese-speaking world, a colour seen as warding off bad luck among people born under the Monkey sign.
Practitioners like Master Ang Tian Cheong of Singapore said the Year of the Monkey would propel Chinese economic growth and may bring political chaos to Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.
The war of words between China and Taiwan, the democratic island considered a renegade province by the mainland, would remain just that, he said."
"Taiwan is behaving like a pet monkey," Ang said. "All teeth and no bite."
World stock markets would boom by the second half of the year and Chinese officials would widen the trading band for the yuan currency by summer, he predicted.
Experts said U.S. President George W. Bush, born in the Year of the Dog in 1946, faced a difficult re-election campaign in 2004 even after the capture of Saddam Hussein.
"Years ruled by the Monkey can bring the culmination of family disturbances, accusations and losing face. The Dog's reputation may be on the line this year," U.S.-based astrologer Shelly Wu wrote.
Tension in the troubled Middle East would lower slightly owing to a mild dose of luck from the East, practitioners said, though the Monkey year was synonymous with hidden dangers.
Master Raymond Lo of Hong Kong, who says he correctly predicted Saddam's downfall in a particularly inauspicious 2003, said 2004 would be a decisive year against international terrorism.
"Like D-Day, it will be a deciding year for long term world peace, but such peace can only come after a final struggle," he predicted.
While each animal sign repeats every 12 years, the combination of zodiac and element, wood in 2004, happens once every 60 years.
In 1944, the last year of the wood monkey, the Allies reached a turning point in World War II and established the Bretton Woods agreement for post-war reconstruction.
Copyright 2004
Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
