Recently, “Spring Festival Gala 2025 of Our Villages” of Haiyan was staged in the Cultural Hall of Yongqing. This year’s Gala integrated modern elements into traditional ones, and local culture into exotic style. 14 foreign friends also made wonderful performances, making the Gala unique and exotic.

At 6:30 p.m., the Gala started with the program “Auspicious Lions’ Dancing”. To the sound of drums, “lions” leaped vigorously, briskly and flexibly, receiving thunderous applause from the audience.

The Gala consists of “Art Teaching” “Art Creating” and “Art Inheriting”, which fall into 12 programs on dancing, singing, skits and operas created and performed by local cultural administrators, talent and special cultural representatives from the villages (communities) of Haiyan. The Gala vividly demonstrated the achievements made by local village-based cultural halls and the rapid development of rural areas in the new era.

Based on the intangible cultural heritage of Tongyuan Town, the dance “Elegant Paper Cuttings” created by Cultural Hall of Tongyuan Village fully showed the cultural charm of paper-cutting art through performers’ dancing postures and makeup. The Gala is both organized and watched by the masses themselves, and it has become an important program to embrace the Spring Festival every year. Xu Xinye was excited after watching the Gala and said, “It is very lively, very festive! It’s amazing to organize such a wonderful performance on the eve of the Spring Festival. I feel very happy.”

The outside of the Hall was equally lively. “Our Market” attracted many tourists and residents to write Spring Festival couplets, make rice cakes, paint sugar pictures, weave bamboo products, which not only reminded locals of their past festive Spring Festival atmosphere, but also attracted 11 foreign students from Russia, Yemen, Morocco, Pakistan, Ecuador, Thailand, etc. Guided by special cultural representatives, they came here to experience local traditional customs and unique charm of Chinese countryside.

Those foreign friends were deeply impressed by “Our Market” full of traditional cultural elements and special products used for the Spring Festival, and soon got accustomed to shopping, watching and experiencing in the crowded Market like locals.

In recent years, Haiyan has attached importance to improving international communication, and regarded it as one of “eight major projects” of building a modern civilization county model of the Chinese nation. Kim Koo Refuge now is a provincial-level international cultural exchange base in the Scenic Area of South-north Lake (Kim Koo, 1876-1949, a Korean Peninsula independence activist, once took refuge in Haiyan). “Sun Rising from the East China Sea” has become a quality interview route for foreign publicity; “Yu Hua’s Literature Hometown” now is Jiaxing’s international communication innovation case and foreign cultural exchange brand. Various groups of international communication brands have taken initial shape in Haiyan.

“Spring Festival Gala of Our Villages” is an innovative expression of the Spring Festival in the new era. Nowadays, organizing a lively Spring Festival Gala in the village-level cultural halls has become a new custom for locals to welcome the Spring Festival. In Haiyan, there are 94 cultural halls, of which eight are five-star; and there is one provincial-level, five municipal-level and 17 county-level special cultural representatives. The county has implemented 23 third-level special cultural representative projects, guided the establishment of over 50 people-centered cultural teams and served more than 80,000 people.