So, the Mayan thing is snowballing in China, stimulating panic buying of necessities, shotgun marriages and raids on personal bank accounts. Check out the fellow who's manufacturing survival arks at around £175,000 a pop, too. It's worth bearing in mind here that expressed as a percentage of the population, the number of people in China who believe this stuff may be identical to the percentage in the West, but the sheer numbers involved in a Chinese context make it a mass market rather than a niche market, and so one can expect businesses to respond accordingly.
There's also the fact that people, including the fellow building the arks, seems to have got the actualy Mayan prophecies confused with the Roland Emmerich film 2012, where China builds a whole series of arks to save humanity from catastrophic flooding. So it's kind of patriotic, too.
Having said that, there's a bit of speculation around that Mayan Apocalypse is shortly going to join June 4 and Dalai Lama as a censored term in the Sinosphere.
Want to tweet in Mayan? Here's how. But there is one draw back...
"The Living Tongues workshops are looking to .... preserv[e] such dialects as mam, a Mayan language from Guatemala. The classes, however, aren’t scheduled to begin until after Dec. 21—the predicted date of the apocalypse, if a well-publicized myth about the Mayan calendar holds true.
Posted by: CMcM | December 12, 2012 at 03:57 PM