Chinese Character of the Year 2025

Here’s a simple speech I gave to explain my pick for the Chinese Character of the Year. What do you think? Do you agree, or have any thoughts?

Have you ever heard of the Word of the Year?
Every year, big dictionaries pick one special word that stands out.

For example, Dictionary.com’s word this year was “67.”
Oxford’s word for 2024 was “brain rot.”
Pretty funny, right?
And there are many more.

Now, halfway across the world, something similar happens, but instead of a word, they choose a character!
In Japan, they started picking a Kanji of the Year back in 1995.
Eleven years later, China started too.
Then Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia all started their own.

In 2017, eleven years after China, I thought, why not do one for America?
After all, Chinese is the third most spoken language at home in the U.S.!

So, I began picking the Character of the Year from America’s point of view.

Why do I do this?
Because I help people and companies translate their names into Chinese.
Announcing the Character of the Year helps me share how beautiful and meaningful the Chinese language is, and it’s great for public relations, too!

So here we are, the big question:
What should be America’s Character of the Year for 2025?

The character I picked is 關 (guan).

At the most basic pictorial level, guan (關) shows a door with two bars used to lock it.
From that, it carries meanings such as gate, checkpoint, border control, closing, locking up, critical point, connection or relationship, and even “level” in video games.
This year, America seems to be all about controlling access:
access to the American market,
access to live here,
and access to American technologies,
as well as managing relationships between countries, friends, and rivals,
with a growing focus on leaders’ personal, relationship-based diplomacy.

Now, let’s look at how one Chinese character can show up in so many ways.

For example:

關稅 (guān shuì) tariff.
You probably haven’t gone a day without hearing that word in the news this year.

關閉 (guān bì) closing.
This year, store closings are happening at nearly twice last year’s pace.
Another “closing” is the closing of the southern border.

關 (guān) by itself can mean to lock up or detain.
As enforcement has increased, more immigrants are being locked up.

關係 (guān xì) relationship or connection.
There has been a lot more focus on personal relationships between leaders,
and relationships between countries are being tested and reshaped.

卡關 (kǎ guān) stuck, blocked, or can’t move forward.
Not everything went America’s way.
China was able to use rare earths as a choke point to gain strong leverage in trade negotiations.
And here at home, things got stuck too:
both parties held their ground, refused to compromise,
and that gridlock led straight to a government shutdown.

關門 (guān mén) shutdown.
In 2025, the U.S. went through the longest government shutdown in history.

And finally, 關鍵 (guān jiàn) pivotal, or key.
One futurist says 2025 is the most important year of our lifetime because four big technologies are coming together: AI, clean energy, bioengineering, and digital governance.

In closing:
tariffs, the government shutdown,
borders closing, businesses closing,
relationships between countries tested,
and what may be, looking back, the single most pivotal year in our lifetime.

That’s my pick for America’s Character of the Year: 關.

Added on November 24, 2025:

We used NotebookLM to explain the Chinese Character of the Year 2025, and the following are six videos.

 

 

The video titled Chinese Character of the Year 2025 is a deep dive with our slides playing and repeating, not fully synced to the audio.

 

 

The video titled 2025 美國年度漢字 is also a deep dive with our slides, but the audio is in Taiwanese-style Chinese.

 

 

The video titled 2025 美国年度汉字 is another deep dive with our slides, but the audio is in Mainland China–style Chinese.

 

 

The video titled アメリカの今年の漢字：たった一文字で語る2025年の物語 is completely generated by AI in Japanese.

 

 

The video titled 2025 美國年度漢字：一字解一年 is completely generated by AI in Traditional Chinese (Taiwan style).

 

 

The video titled 美国年度汉字：2025 is completely generated by AI in Simplified Chinese (China style).