The Year of the Tiger (虎年) is now more than a week old; but major Chinese websites still wear the auspicious red and yellow colours, sign that the festivities are not over yet. The country is still in the return phase of its annual migration.

Every year on new year’s eve the Chinese Central Television (中央电视台) broadcasts a special live New Year’s Evening (春晚) program. For many, watching this program with the whole family has become part of the new year celebrations. It consists of a series of humorous sketches, performances by famous pop singers, acrobatics (杂技); etc.

With the massive popularization of the internet, this one-time event has now been multiplied in a series of small sequences that live on and can be viewed and reviewed on the net.

All big internet content providers have their dedicated page, where one can watch videos of the different performances from that night. If television provides a sense of synchronicity, where a whole family and most of the country, watches the same program simultaneously; the internet now offers the possibility to delay the viewing of the program and split it accordingly to ones preferences.

If you are just interested to see how Wang Fei (王菲), the famous actress and singer, performed on the stage of the Year of the Tiger program, you can do so. If you have been avidly following the Winter Olympics and didn’t have time to celebrate the new year, you can still catch up.

All big internet platforms are competing in celebrating the new year and offering related services to their readers. Even Google (surprise, surprise,…) is offering a special version of Google Maps, where one can check the train and plane timetables for the period of the spring transportation (春运).

Embedded bellow is a Chinese acrobatics performance from the Year of the Tiger show. The Chinese word for acrobatics, translated literally, means “mixed skills”. Chinese acrobatics are a variety of ancestral techniques and instruments. When done well, the result can be very entertaining: