BEIJING -- The Chinese New Year will kick off soon. At the time for New Year's blessings, a tradition of the Chinese people is to greet each other with "lucky" words laced with the zodiac animal of the year.

Days ahead of the Year of the Tiger, President Xi Jinping wished villagers in rural Shanxi Province to be energetic like "dragons rising and tigers leaping," cheering them on to make their lives better with full vigor and dedication.

The phrase "dragons rising and tigers leaping" originates from a piece of prose by Yan Cong, a scholar of Tang Dynasty (618-907).

The tiger, one of the 12 animal signs of the Chinese zodiac, symbolizes strength, bravery, and fearlessness in traditional Chinese culture.

During a recent inspection tour in Shanxi, Xi made a special trip to visit and extended Chinese New Year's greetings to villagers of Fengnanyuan, one of the places hard hit by floods last fall.

The spirit of "dragons rising and tigers leaping" is exactly what the Fengnanyuan villagers and other disaster-affected people need in rebuilding their homes.

It is also about motivating China's rural areas to redouble efforts in the Year of the Tiger to consolidate the achievements of poverty reduction and advance rural vitalization.