Cultural significance of Spring Festival Gala is world-class: Global Times editorial
Global Times
“The creative performances are amazing. Love our traditional culture!” “Each frame of the dances with awesome creativity and message is too beautiful to be true.” As of 12 am on the first day of the Chinese Lunar New Year, this year’s chunwan, also known as the Spring Festival Gala hosted by China Media Group’s (CMG), recorded an average rating of 20.23 percent on TV terminals. The number of audiences through new media platforms hit 655 million, while the total number of viewers of the vertical screen broadcast reached 179 million. Outside China, through the China Global Television Network, an international division of CMG, more than 1,000 media outlets from more than 170 countries and regions around the world simultaneously broadcast or reported on the Spring Festival Gala in 68 languages. The Spring Festival Gala has become an important avenue through which the Chinese New Year story is told to the world.
Forty years since its first broadcast in 1983, the Spring Festival Gala can still steadily maintain such massive appeal among audiences. This very point shows the cultural significance the gala show has is world-class. A culturally influential modern nation should have its representative modern cultural products, one of which is the Spring Festival Gala that crystallizes the Chinese people’s spirit and creativity. Marks of China’s 40 years of national development and progress, as well as changes in every family, can be seen in the show. The annual Spring Festival Gala creates a warm collective memory for generations, becoming a common Chinese New Year custom for all Chinese people and a unique, mega-scale cultural phenomenon in the world.
The Spring Festival Gala is also a mirror of the times, reflecting China’s progress from the early days of its reform and opening-up, as well as the country’s growing global influence. It also mirrors the hardships and joys of countless ordinary Chinese families when they create a new life with their own hands and it records China’s continuous integration into the world. The promotional videos of this year’s Spring Festival Gala were viewed at the United Nations, shown in many European landmarks, screened in US cinemas and sports events, and displayed at New York Times Square – known as “The Crossroads of the World.” More and more people worldwide are getting to know the Spring Festival Gala. Behind the show is the overall rise of Chinese culture’s international influence and China’s national strength. In its unique way, the Spring Festival Gala remembers, inherits, and promotes every spiritual spark in our nation and every footprint that we as a nation have walked on this long and hard journey.
Unlike other shows, the Spring Festival Gala is a “get-together” party for all. Rooted in the Chinese society, the style of such events has played the role of uniting and encouraging people in many key moments. Under the “joyful” theme, the Spring Festival Gala connects the beliefs and emotions of hundreds of millions of viewers, unites Chinese people’s cultural identity and memories, and brings closer the relationship between individual households and the country. The theme of this year’s Spring Festival Gala was “A New Era of Prosperity, Better Life in Each Passing Day.” This shows the Chinese nation’s optimistic, vigorous, strong, and proactive spirit, resonating with the nation at the special moment of Chinese New Year’s Eve.
“Each household is a mini-country, and a country consists of millions of households.” This year’s Spring Festival Gala tells the stories of many ordinary people, from the guy on the subway who gave his shoulder for a worker to lean on to the kid who brought a stool for a worker to sit on and rest, to the deliveryman who didn’t leave his post. Life is the most moving program of the Spring Festival Gala, and the people are the event’s most stable “die-hard fans.” After hardship, the whole country and society have more centripetal force to move forward with courage. All of the ordinary people are amazingly great heroes. They are the vivid realness of this world, representing that the nation’s strength, kindness, and unity will always continue from generation to generation.
For the Chinese people who have experienced the storms, the annual Spring Festival Gala threads what happened in the past years, while “looking forward” is the constant melody of the show. If the Spring Festival is a reunion that brings together a population as large as the Chinese people, then the Spring Festival Gala is a joyful and moving event at a specific juncture that inspires people to create the future with their own hands and inspires them to strive for the future. Despite the difficulties and challenges ahead, we are always inspired by this spiritual power. Such a national spirit has been fully manifested in the Spring Festival Gala.
“Hello, Spring!” To greet spring is the hope the Spring Festival Gala has for the new year and it is also the common voice of millions of Chinese people. In Chinese culture, spring contains so many beautiful messages: It could be the seeds breaking through the ground, the revival, the new life, and going upward. A group of “bunnies” planted the flowers of spring on the stage of this year’s Spring Festival Gala, and countless seeds have taken root in the land of China and will soon burst into the bloom that belongs to this era. We believe that we are going to have a much better spring.
