China Media Group (CMG) on Friday released the official theme and logo for its 2025 Spring Festival Gala, marking the start of the Year of the Snake on the Chinese lunar calendar, coming in late January 2025.
The theme of this year’s gala is “Year of the Snake, Keep Your Spirits Awake” (“巳巳如意，生生不息”), inviting global Chinese communities to join in the New Year’s Eve celebration.
The Chinese lunar calendar divides time into 60-year-long cycles and represents each year with 10 “Tiangan” characters and 12 “Dizhi” characters. For the Year of the Snake, which roughly fits the year 2025, the characters are “乙巳.”
The logo for the gala depicts two “巳” characters placed side by side. The left character is upright, while the right one is an upside-down mirror image. This way of placing the characters matches the traditional Chinese style of placing a pair of ruyis. A ruyi is a decorative object widely used in China to express the hope for wishes to come true, which will also be the first half of the gala’s main theme.
The second half is a fixed expression in the Chinese language that means the endless cycle of life.
