Happy 牛 Year

"Happy 牛 Year" can be seen on signs all around China right now, and unless you have a primitive knowledge of both English and Chinese it's not clever. The character "牛" is pronounced similarly to the English 'new' as you could have guessed, making the above sound like 'Happy New Year'. That's not really clever, what's clever is that the Chinese assign a different animal for every lunar year with a cycle of twelve, and this year is the year of the cow. The character 牛 also happens to mean 'cow'. So there you have it, Gooooo China!