The Spring Festival Travel Season

As 2019 ends and 2020 begins, the annual Chunyun also approaches.

Chunyun, also referred to as the Spring Festival travel season, is the largest periodic human migration in human history. In about 40 days, there are roughly around 3 billion journeys made from city to city. China’s Spring Festival transport has been selected as the world’s largest cyclical transport peak by the World Record Association.

In general, Spring Festival Transport refers to the intercity transportation in mainland China, excluding the transportation between Mainland China and Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, as well as international ravel.

A majority of the 3 billion journeys is made up of working class workers who have moved to metropolises such as Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou in search of work and better opportunities and are making roundtrips to their hometowns during the holidays for family reunions or to reconnect with friends.

Hence, the most popular means of transportation during this time is the train, as it is the most cost-effective and reliable for the working class. Other common means of transportation are car and plane. Despite the fact that China’s rail networks is one of the largest and most advanced in the world, it usually struggles to keep up with the sheer number of passengers around this time of year. As such, social issues such as safety problems arise during the Spring Festival travel season each year.

This is reminiscent of the crisis at the Guangzhou Railway Station during the 2016 Spring Festival travel season, where nearly 100,000 travelers were stranded in the station when snow and tumultuous weather delayed dozens of trains.

In recent years, China has added many new railways and introduced new technologies to accommodate larger numbers of travelers during the travel rush. As smartphones are ubiquitous nowadays, some railway stations introduced “ticketless travel”, which is a method of payment that produces a QR code, reducing the strain of passengers collecting tickets at the station.

The Spring Festival travel season in 2020 starts from January 10 and ends on February 18, a 40-day period which starts 15 days before the festival and lasts until 25 days after the festival. The estimated population flow this year is 440 million.

With the Spring Festival travel season beginning soon, we should celebrate the tradition of visiting family and cherishing family, no matter how far they may be.