Tens of thousands of Chinese couples are rushing to tie the knot on Sunday in the belief that the “lucky number day” will bring them a perfect marriage.

When written out numerically, Sunday is the 10th day of the 10th month of 2010.

With the number 10 implying perfection in Chinese, the 10/10/10 lucky day has been selected by a lot of young people as the day to exchange their vows, just as the days in previous years – 08/08/08 and 09/09/09 – which were also days believed to be lucky.

“I tried to book a fancy hotel in March, more than six months ahead, but I found that all the good wedding banquets on Oct 10 were already sold out,” said Liu Mengmeng, 29, from Shanghai.

Similarly, tables for wedding parties in most hotels in China’s major cities were hard to book even half a year ago.

“We charge 3,588 yuan ($538) for each table, which is 20 percent higher on Oct 10 than usual days. In spite of that, the banquet halls had been fully booked in April,” said Ma Chuan, marketing manager of the Chang An Grand Hotel in Beijing.

Ma said more people might choose Oct 10 as their big day since it falls on the weekend.

“This Oct 10 happens to be a Sunday. Sept 9, 2009 and Aug 8, 2008 fell on working days, and many guests might not have shown up at the wedding if you had chosen those two days,” Ma said.

In Shanghai, the usual booking schedule was as long as 12 months in advance, according to a marketing manager surnamed Zhu with the Hongqiao Villa hotel.

“There are usually several lucky days in a year, and you have to book a year in advance for them,” Zhu said.

She said the next lucky day after Oct 10 will be Oct 23 – and for that day the entire wedding hall has been booked.

In Shenzhen, wedding service agent Yang Yi said he had arranged six couples’ weddings for Oct 10, and is preparing more.

“Some couples came to me so late that I couldn’t get everything ready in time, so they had to put off their plans,” Yang said. “After all, everybody wants to marry on that day, and the earlier you start, the better wedding you get.”

Wedding services for Oct 10 were booked before August in Beijing, and the schedule should be set by September at the latest in Shenzhen, Guangdong province.

Marriage register offices in most cities were similarly crowded, as civil affairs bureaus in many cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Jinan, Dalian and Zhengzhou decided to work extra hours on Sunday to register new couples.

According to earlier reports in the Shanghai Morning Post, the local authority was expecting record-setting registration volume on Sunday. The city had 7,189 marriage registrations on Aug 8, 2008 and 8,852 on Sept 9, 2009.

“Nearly 700 couples had come to the registration office for reservations,” said an official with the marriage register office in the Dongcheng district in Beijing who refused to give his name.

He said that since early September people have been able to register at the office in person to place an order for marriage registration on Oct 10, and no one would be able to register that day without a reservation.

“That number of 700 is almost tenfold the everyday registration number, so we have arranged extra staff to ensure all the couples can get registered on that day,” he said.

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The yuan on Friday climbed to the highest level since 1993 amid growing foreign demand for a faster currency appreciation.

However, a senior Chinese official warned that if the yuan appreciates too fast, it could harm the world’s economy, as well as China’s.

The yuan was traded at 6.6830 against the greenback on Friday, advancing 22 percent since China removed its peg to the US dollar and pledged to add more flexibility to the yuan.

China is committed to moving toward a flexible exchange rate regime but “our approach will be a gradual one”, said Yi Gang, vice-governor of the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, at a forum during the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in Washington on Thursday.

“We will do our part to help correct global imbalance through a gradual appreciation of the yuan,” said Yi, also head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.

Yi’s comments echoed the tone set by Premier Wen Jiabao during his visit to Europe, where he called on European leaders to refrain from pressing for a stronger yuan and warned a sharp appreciation may cause social unrest in China and “lead to a disaster for the world”.

“Calling for a rapid yuan revaluation is unreasonable, as it takes time for resources to flow from the trade sector to the non-trade sector after an appreciation,” said Chen Daofu, a senior economist at the Development Research Center of the State Council.

“A fast appreciation will block the effective flow of resources, causing serious social and economic problems and even dragging down growth,” he said.

Zhao Xijun, deputy head of Renmin University of China’s school of finance, said it is not in any countries’ interest if China’s growth loses steam, as the country has been a leading force for global economic recovery and is growing into a large importer.

The IMF said in its latest World Economic Outlook report that China’s expansion in recent years was the “linchpin” for global trade and boosted numerous economies. It predicted the Chinese economy will grow 10.5 percent this year, compared to its forecast of 4.8-percent global growth in 2010.

The US House of Representatives last week passed a bill that allows the country to use its own estimates of currency undervaluation to calculate countervailing duties on imports from China.

Economists pointed out, however, that yuan appreciation cannot help resolve global imbalance fundamentally and countries must conduct thorough structural change domestically to contribute to global economic recovery.

“The dollar and euro are weakening due to the ultra-loose monetary policies in US and European countries, which have prompted governments of emerging market countries to intervene in the market,” Chen said.

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Could the tea party shake up the U.S. Congressional elections in November?

That speculation is not entirely unfounded, since the loosely organized group, with its “taxed enough already” namesake and support of mostly conservative Republican candidates, has already seen more than a dozen of its favored candidates win in primary and special elections.

The group has had a recent string of victories in Republican primaries in Alaska, Colorado, Kentucky, New York and Utah, with Christine O’Donnell’s victory over Rep. Michael N. Castle in Delaware being the biggest upset. But for all its attention in the press, how big — or how little — will tea party-backed candidates win in November? And will the movement eventually fizzle out?

Clay Ramsay, research director at the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, said the tea party has already effected the November elections.

“They have already had a significant impact because they have been in primaries against established Republican figures and have unseated some of them — and that is no small thing to do,” he said.

Still, he forecast that one or two of the movement’s favored candidates will win and one or two will lose. And weather the movement will help or hurt the GOP after the elections remains “ambiguous,” he said.

John Fortier, fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said: “For the most part, the tea parties will play an incredibly positive role for Republicans this election.” He added that tea party Republicans will beat their Democratic opponents. “But there is a question about the future.”

“In general, the tea party provides energy and turnout for Republicans,” he said. “It is also a uniting force for Republicans, as their main focus is the economy and small government, which many Republicans and independents support even though they are not as intense about this issue as tea party members.”

Polls show that many conservatives — mostly Republicans but also some independents — support the tea party’s aims. And a substantial fraction of Americans — between 30 percent and 50 percent in polls — are relatively positive toward the movement, he said.

Darrell M. West, director of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, said voters agree with the group on the bad economy and that deficits are too high, but do not share the movement’ s general ideological orientation. “Many of the tea party candidates are much more conservative than the country as a whole,” he said. “This may help Democrats retain control of the Senate if voters conclude some of the Republican nominees are outside the national mainstream.”

Dan Mahaffee, special assistant to the president at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, said that historically such populist trends have popped up amid times of economic difficulty and political deadlock.

The lifespan of the tea party will be determined by how long the economy takes to improve and how long the political system takes to start functioning again, he said.

But with economists predicting that the jobs picture will not return to pre-recession levels for years to come — some even say a decade — the tea party could be around for a while.

Despite their anger about the economy, some studies show that tea party sympathizers tend to be more economically secure than the rest of the population, Ramsay said.

He believes the bad economy, per se, is not the key driver of the movement. Rather, the sense of being deeply shaken up by the harsh economic downturn and the belief that the economic system in general is in crisis is what drives the movement.

“They seem to be the angriest people but they also seem to be the best off,” he said.

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