101 THINGS TO DO BEFORE YOUR SKY BURIAL

There’s a scene in Wedding Crashers where the guys switch to crashing funerals as an even more sure fire way of getting laid.

Well funeral crashing is all the rage across the Tibetan regions of China.

Almost every paleface with a backpack is determined to witness a sky burial. Like the mile high club or bungee jumping – it’s become just one more thing to tick off before you’re thirty.

In Litang I overheard an extremely bumptious Israeli girl demanding directions to the burial ground. She was undeterred when a young Tibetan woman advised her not to turn up uninvited.

A young Frenchman, who called himself a philosopher but had never heard of Foucault, had already attended two burials. He was planning to make an ethno-fiction film – whatever that may be.

Well I hope they both had fun at the funeral of a 23 year old lad who had died of an infectious disease.

Call me squeamish, old fashioned or whatever, but I don’t hold with it. Enough already. Let the families mourn in peace.

SAY CHEESY! CHINA’S WEDDING PHOTO BOOM

In the public park there are giant crescent moons, plaster cherubs, romantic garden swings, and a full-size mock-up of a Christian church. A tape loop is blaring out the wedding march. Dozens of young brides in wedding dresses and grooms in white tuxedos are milling around looking strangely glum.

Artsy photographers with ponytails coax the brides into incongruously sexy poses while lighting assistants fuss about.

It’s only when a bride hitches up her dress to reveal a pair of blue jeans that you realize nobody is getting married today. In China the photo-shoot takes place before the wedding.

Welcome to China’s multi-million dollar wedding photo industry. Couples spend thousands of dollars on glossy albums to record – well – a not very special day.

EATS BABIES SHOOTS DOLPHINS..AND LIVES?

Reporting the recent extinction of the Yangtze river dolphin, most Western newspapers somehow managed to blame Mao Zedong, everyone’s favorite villain.

Apparently, an ‘overthrowing idols’ campaign in the late 1950s broke a long-standing taboo on hunting dolphins and their numbers started to decline.

Now no-one can deny the chairman had a dark side to say the least, but can he really be held responsible for the extinction of a river species thirty-one years after his death in 1976?

In the 1980s there was still a viable population of hundreds of dolphins. Careless fishing practices and river pollution did for the dolphin over the following 20 years.

One could also add that in the 1950s environmental consciousness was low worldwide. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth were not set up until 1972.

The current fashion of blaming Mao for absolutely everything reached a crescendo with the publication of Chang and Halliday’s diabolography (of which pirate Chinese editions are on sale on the street for 12 RMB).

Of course pinning everything on Mao suits both China’s capitalist Communist Party and its Western friends. Everything wrong with China is tagged as a hangover from Maoism and present leaders neatly sidestep any blame.

CHINA’S CRACKPOT CRUSADERS

It’s hard to imagine 100,000 Chinese Christians evangelizing the Muslim world. Yet that’s the target China’s grassroots house churches have set themselves.

The Back to Jerusalem Movement believes East Asia’s Christians have been called by God to convert the Islamic world – now a no-go area for Western missionaries.

China’s house churches are highly organized and intensely political. They see themselves standing side-by-side with America in a clash of civilizations. And in their cult-like atmosphere naive recruits can easily turn into potential martyrs.

But the most likely result of their plans is a disaster similar to the recent Taliban kidnap of 23 Korean missionaries in Afghanistan.

Chinese citizens are already being targeted by Islamic militants. The July murder of Chinese engineers in Pakistan caused a diplomatic spat with a country that China has courted over decades.

The Chinese government will try to prevent missionaries traveling abroad. But if the house churches even partially succeed in their plans, it had better brace itself for more embarrassment.