Poll Stars
Ancient Chinese emperors drew their absolute power from the Mandate of Heaven, the belief that emperors were chosen to lead by divine right.
Under this system, there were no whiny electorates to soothe, but there was a catch: the only way a new emperor could justify overthrowing the old one and seizing power was to invoke the mandate's small print -- that it could be revoked by the people at any time if the emperor excelled perversely in cruelty or corruption.
To gauge the pulse of the planets and to predict their political fortunes, emperors for over 2000 years sought the advice of astrologers -- akin, perhaps, to contemporary pollsters. The astrologers, or geomancers, used star charts, magnetic spoons, floating turtles, and even an early form of chess to determine fate.
So on the eve of the American presidential elections, Candide put this quasi-science to a test and asked Lu Yang, the former head of Nanjing University's astronomy department, and an amateur astrologer, to summon his magical methods to predict the election results. First, professor Lu translated the symbols of the different political parties, the elephant and the donkey, into the Chinese characters luu and xiang. Next, he counted the strokes of each character and converted them into trigrams.
Finally, he divided these trigrams by the trigram for the year 1996 and compared the results. The donkey weighed in the winner on the good-fortune scale and thus Bill Clinton has the turkey in the bag.
Not that we're cynical or anything, but for some back-up perspective we took a poll on the express train from Shanghai to Nanjing. A sample of passengers were asked the following question: "If the American elections were held today, who would you vote for -- if you cared, and if you were permitted to vote?"
Most Chinese said that Sino-American relations was their number one concern, but seemed otherwise indifferent about the outcome. Ironically, our survey of disinterested, uninformed Chinese travelers revealed nearly identical results as the latest CNN poll of likely American voters bombarded by campaign compost.
 | "I would vote for myself, I don't like any of them," said Xu Shaohua. |
 | "I'd like to vote for someone who was good-looking, like Reagan." |
 | "We, the Chinese, don't like Clinton." |
 | "Who is Bob Dole?" |
The Candide Poll Results:
Clinton -- 56.7%
Dole -- 33.3%
Perot -- 6.7%
Xu -- 3.3%
CNN Poll
Clinton -- 51%
Dole -- 37%
Perot ` -- 8%
Undecided -- 4%
