Summary
From red packets and wedding dates to costly license plates and phone numbers, numerical patterns become socially powerful when people share their meanings, hopes and emotional responses.
At a glance
Lucky numbers have no inherent value; their meaning develops through shared cultural associations, emotional recognition and hopes for favorable outcomes. These beliefs can offer comfort, shape celebrations and influence markets, but commercial promotion can amplify their appeal. The source distinguishes this emotional attachment from superstition, which begins when belief becomes obsessive or governs happiness and major decisions.
The meaning of a number no longer lies in any value assigned to the number itself, but in the recognition and emotional satisfaction people find within themselves; it becomes a shared way for a group to communicate.
“I want to donate the lucky number 116, so the pandemic will end sooner!” After hearing the village committee’s appeal for donations to fight the pandemic, 90-year-old Ding Sumei gave some of her own spending money. To her, the contribution offered not only practical help but also a measure of good fortune.
During those two months, news continued to arrive of organizations around the country raising money for the pandemic response. When China Power, part of the State Power Investment Corporation, organized an employee donation drive, one worker sent a WeChat red packet containing 666 yuan with the message: “May this lucky number help our country overcome this crisis smoothly. Spring will surely come!”
With the pandemic still not over, attractive, auspicious numbers offered something like comfort during that difficult period. In fact, red-packet amounts with special numerical meanings had long been popular, as the annual wave of red packets on May 20 showed. According to WeChat’s data on “love-confession red packets,” sending peaked at midnight on May 20: in a single minute, more than 700,000 users sent over 860,000 red packets carrying special meanings, in amounts such as 5.20, 13.14 and 520.
It is at moments like these that we discover even people who normally dismiss any sense of ritual cannot simply walk past an attractive number, while those who do not consider themselves superstitious are hardly immune to the good wishes such numbers seem to carry.
Telephone numbers, mobile numbers, license plates, floors and room numbers—wherever numbers appear, people try to assemble the most attractive combination possible. Apart from identity-card numbers, there is probably no set of digits that Chinese people will not try to arrange.
Cold numbers and warm hopes: the contrast is real. Once that period of hardship has passed, people may look back on everything they imagined those favorable numbers could mean with a mixture of wry amusement and an unexpected fondness.
The More Festivals We Invent, the More Numbers Are to Blame Our admiration for attractive numerical combinations has long been commonplace. Consider individual digits alone: 3, 6, 8 and 9 are associated with auspicious meanings, while 4 has become something people go out of their way to avoid.
For people fascinated by numerical combinations, nothing is more exciting than the date changing every day: the more variations it produces, the more surprises it can bring.
Traditional Valentine’s Day and the Qixi Festival were no longer enough for number enthusiasts, so 520 emerged. Its popularity is no lower than that of traditional Valentine’s Day; even some middle-aged and older people who rarely spend time online and do not celebrate February 14 will mark May 20.
Whenever the invented celebration of 520 arrives, civil affairs bureaus turn into vast public displays of romance. Every May 20, news coverage reliably features both the registration offices and the crowds of couples lining up to marry.
When a supposedly once-in-a-century date comes along, marriage registrations rise even further. Take January 4, 2013, promoted as the “Day of Everlasting Love”: according to a China News Service report at the time, the Beijing Civil Affairs Bureau expected more than 10,000 couples to register in the city that day.
A statistical report on social services for the fourth quarter of 2013, later released by Beijing’s civil affairs authorities, showed that approximately 160,000 couples registered marriages in Beijing over the whole of that year.
That would mean registrations on January 4, 2013 alone accounted for roughly one-sixteenth of the annual total. And that was only one in a series of invented numerical occasions, alongside the “Olympic weddings” of August 8, 2008, the “Day of Everlasting Love” on September 9, 2009 and the “World Day of Love” on December 12, 2012.
The hope invested in auspicious numerical meanings turns every attractive date into a festival. Belief in favorable numbers supplies the main psychological force behind the popularity of invented occasions such as 520, but commercial promotion is also indispensable.
Singles’ Day has become a global shopping carnival, yet it is only one of many retail festivals. Shopping platforms repeatedly choose dates with appealing numerical patterns for new promotions, creating a situation in which virtually every month has its own shopping festival.
Beyond occasions such as 5.20 and 11.11, which already enjoy broad emotional recognition, the successive appearance of shopping festivals on 6.18, 9.9 and 8.8 also reflects merchants responding to people’s attachment to numbers.
Some people always insist that true love can endure regardless of the wedding date, while others say there are so many shopping festivals that they have lost interest. Yet when the day actually arrives, how many can avoid admitting that it is appealing after all? Who does not want an auspicious start?
Numbers Are the Ultimate Money-Making IP Once merchants spotted the opportunity, dates with attractive numerical combinations could be turned into shopping festivals, and with the right marketing, doubling sales was hardly out of the question.
This shows that attractive numbers and numerical combinations really can become tools for generating wealth, with drawing power comparable to that of the biggest intellectual properties.
License plate auctions offer the clearest demonstration of numbers’ money-making power. At the end of 2016, a plate auctioned in Jieyang, Guangdong, broke the record for a license plate sale in mainland China: Yue V99999 sold for 3.2 million yuan. Using the gold price on that day, some internet users calculated that each gram of iron in the plate had cost sixteen times as much as a gram of gold.
Yue V99999 became the most expensive piece of sheet metal thanks, naturally, to its five 9s, a combination associated with the supreme status of the “nine and five.” Nor are metal plates priced like gold especially rare: Yu J00005 was valued at 3 million yuan, Yue V88888 at 2.5 million, and countless desirable plates have fetched sums well above one million.
If an excellent numerical combination can send a license plate’s price soaring, a poor one can leave a plate unsold. Hong Kong plate 9413 was one such unwanted number.
Because 9413 sounds like the phrase “nine deaths, one life,” implying a narrow escape from death, the plate entered the auction market in 2001 but remained unsold for years. It finally sold at the minimum price in 2009, only to be returned three years later; when it went back to auction, it failed to sell again.
Burdened by its unfortunate homophone, returned by a buyer and passed over at five auctions, 9413 seemed to grow ever less lovable. It was finally sold in 2017, though whether that buyer would return it a few years later remained anyone’s guess.
In an age determined to erase differences of rank among people, numbers have instead been deliberately sorted into higher and lower classes. Is that not, in its own way, a reflection of society?
Just as desirable license plates command high prices, attractive telephone numbers can cost more than ordinary ones. Not long before the source was written, a Mr. Yang in Baoji said that his mobile number ending in 8888, obtained ten years earlier, had been suspended over an unpaid balance of 28 yuan; when he tried to apply for it again, the required spending had increased. Whatever judgment one makes about that dispute, the report offered a glimpse of the consumption requirements then attached to desirable numbers.
At that time, obtaining a desirable number ending in 8888 under China Unicom’s terms required minimum monthly spending of 800 yuan for twenty consecutive years—a cumulative 192,000 yuan—to retain the number. A higher-tier number, such as one containing eight identical digits in a row, required 288,000 yuan in prepaid charges, minimum monthly spending of 6,000 yuan and a wait of 48 months before the plan could be changed.
Strictly speaking, every user merely rents a number and holds the right to use it. Numbering resources belong to the state; even telecommunications operators cannot freely buy and sell them, much less impose an additional charge simply for selecting a particular number.
Yet although operators cannot sell desirable numbers outright, they can still raise the cost of using them by setting monthly minimum-spending requirements.
If desirable numbers are money-making tools, then they are resources not to be allowed out of the fold. After mobile number portability opened the previous year, switching networks became genuinely convenient for ordinary numbers, but desirable numbers—the VIPs of phone numbers, the fighter jets of the numerical world—were far harder to move.
Contracts between operators and users of desirable numbers often run for ten or twenty years. Trying to transfer such a number to another network during that period can be treated as a breach of contract, potentially bringing compensation charges amounting to tens of thousands of yuan.
Where there is demand, a market follows. As countless people embraced attractive numerical combinations, a gray-market supply chain gradually formed. Operators may be prohibited from selling numbers, but intermediaries can do so, ultimately earning extra money by exploiting the public’s belief in and admiration for attractive digits.
Buying a desirable number is a voluntary bargain between a willing seller and a willing buyer. But if buyers were asked why they pay more for a string of digits merely because it looks attractive, perhaps even they would struggle to answer.
Numbers possess no inherent value of this kind, but human ideas can confer value on them. Is an attractive string of digits really so important? For these buyers, the answer itself is beside the point.
Belief in Numbers Is Not Just an Eastern Mystical Force
Whenever such stories appear, someone will remark that Chinese superstition about numbers has a long history and is embedded in the nation’s genes. But it would be deeply unfair to dismiss the phenomenon as mere superstition or explain it simply as an ancient Chinese tradition of numerical belief.
Assigning favorable or unfavorable meanings to numbers was not a Chinese invention. Even 4, now widely shunned, was never disliked in old expressions such as “ambitions extending in all four directions,” “the five lakes and four seas” and “steady on all four sides.”
On the contrary, people in earlier times liked arranging things in groups of four: the Confucian canon included the Four Books, Wuzhong had its Four Talents, and Su Shi’s circle had its Four Scholars. In Chinese culture, 4 did not inherently signify disaster.
The practice of making numbers stand for particular meanings came from the West. In Western custom, 13 is strongly taboo: the Last Supper of Jesus and the twelve disciples took place on Friday the thirteenth, and the thirteenth person at the table was Judas, who betrayed Jesus. The source therefore describes 13 as having long been considered unlucky in Hebrew culture.
Ancient Greek culture likewise regarded 13 as a number that brought misfortune. According to the legend presented in the source, twelve gods were attending a banquet when a thirteenth, uninvited god—Loki, the god of trouble and quarrels—appeared and ultimately caused the death of the gods’ beloved Balder.
Some buildings in Western countries label the thirteenth floor 12A, some streets have no house numbered 13, and some theaters omit row 13. Not every Westerner shares this taboo, but ominous stories about 13 in what the source calls the West’s two major cultural origins have made the number widely feared. After the Apollo 13 accident, some people even claimed the disaster had been foreseeable simply because of the number.
The outline of today’s division between lucky and unlucky numbers emerged from the mixing of Western taboos surrounding particular numbers with the traditional Chinese practice of selecting auspicious dates.
Returning to the origins of the special meanings attached to numbers reveals a form of cultural belief grounded in emotional identification, rather than mere superstition or some unpredictable mystical force.
After the straightforward wordplay linking 8 with “prosperity” and 4 with “death,” today’s number enthusiasts have gradually begun to return to a form of belief rooted in culture and emotion.
It is not older people but young people who display the strongest belief in numbers. They face greater uncertainty about the future, and their hope that attractive numbers will bring good luck reflects a desire to seek advantage and avoid harm. As Hugo said, people need belief, and those who believe in nothing will not be happy.
If believing in attractive numbers creates a sense of happiness, and believing in a lucky number inspires hope for good fortune, there is nothing especially objectionable about it.
When growing numbers of people find themselves unable to look away from attractive digits before they have even noticed their own fascination, and when a perfectly arranged sequence evokes shared amazement or delight, that group has already developed a common language and a shared set of values.
Under this shared belief in numbers, social differences fall away, and people find common emotional ground and consolation. Everyone approaches 520 with the same expectation, and the sight of 8888 seems to strike everyone with the same visual force.
The meaning of a number no longer lies in any value assigned to the number itself, but in each person’s inward recognition and emotional satisfaction; it has become a way for a group to communicate.
Belief becomes superstition only when it turns into an obsession. Registering a marriage on February 2, 2020 might have added a special touch, but insisting that anyone who failed to marry that day could never be happy would have been absurd.
Reason is not the only way to understand the world; belief in numbers can also serve as an intuitive, emotional mode of perception. Provided that abuse and excessive dependence are excluded, what people choose to believe in or revere is their own affair.
The ranks of those who believe in numbers include plenty of highly educated and capable people. What they lack is not knowledge; perhaps what is missing is confidence in life and the courage to face it.
Frequently asked questions
Why do people consider certain numbers lucky?
Numbers possess no inherent value of this kind, but human ideas can confer value on them. Their perceived luck can grow from language, cultural associations, emotional identification and a desire to seek advantage and avoid harm.
Are beliefs about lucky and unlucky numbers exclusively Chinese?
Assigning favorable or unfavorable meanings to numbers was not a Chinese invention. The source presents today’s division between lucky and unlucky numbers as emerging from Western taboos surrounding particular numbers mixing with the traditional Chinese practice of selecting auspicious dates.
How do attractive numbers acquire commercial value?
Shared demand allows attractive dates to support retail festivals and desirable numerical combinations to command higher prices or spending requirements for license plates and telephone numbers. The auction prices and telecommunications terms in the article belong to the historical reports and conditions described by the source.
When does belief in lucky numbers become superstition?
Belief becomes superstition only when it turns into an obsession. The source’s defense of numerical belief excludes abuse and excessive dependence, including the claim that missing a particular date necessarily prevents happiness.
