About numbers superstition. I will be very surprised that they actually get influenced by it and drop "2014". Note that CCP still officially regard "superstition" as something negative---they are still very much atheist, and CCP members are officially banned from any of such practices in terms of party discipline.
Much of the number superstition is non-sense anyway, and as PLAWolf has said much of the current superstition with "4" and "8" came after 90s, when Hong Kong culture hit the mainland and became cool. I personally experienced the growing popularity of number 8 the first hand. 8 used to mean really NOTHING when I was a young child.
Numbers 6 and 9 always had significance in history due to Zhou Yi. 6 represented Yin and 9 represented Yang. "5" is signifiant in that there are 5 elements, 5 colours and 5 directions etc in (Chinese) classical philosophy. "3" represented the three entities of Heaven, Man and Earth. Okay, you have 8 basic Gua in Zhou Yi (and 64 combined), but number 8 in itself has no significance at all. If you read Chinese classical texts, no where does number 8 gets assigned any significance. The emperor and imperial power is always represented by "9"---being both "Yang", aka Heaven, and the highest possible number (mod 10 (fingers)): 九鼎---the Nine Caldrons, symbolising the divine authority of the Son of Heaven; 九洲---the Nine Regions, symbolising all land underneath heaven; etc. But all numbers even significant represent just abstract ideas, and there are NO subjective "good" or "bad" attached to them.
The current association of luck with the numbers such as 4 and 8 based on phonetics has no classical roots, and is more of a Chinese pop (or can be regarded as "peasant") culture.