Trains, Planes and Automobiles

Alright, so this post is a bit late, and I don't really have an excuse. Chinese New Year was two Mondays ago on the 26th. CNY (also known as the Spring Festival even though it's really not even close to Spring yet) is by far the biggest holiday in China; it's like American Thanksgiving and Christmas all rolled into one. This year, Chinese people made over 2.3 billion trips in the month or so that travel really peaks. That's as many train trips as all of Britain made in 2005-06. Assuming that every passenger makes two trips (home and back), that still means that 85% of the population is moving around during this one month.

If you're thinking, "there's no way China's infrastructure can adequately move all those people", you're right. The daily capacity of China's rail system is "only" 3.4 million each day. They pull in some extra trains and all that, but still, there's a pretty significant shortfall. People line up for days to get tickets. (And scalpers, accordingly, can usually get 2-3x face value from desperate travelers.) And don't forget, if you're a migrant worker from NW China and you're looking to get home from Shanghai for the holidays, you're also probably going to be stuck on a hard seat or with just standing room for 2-3 days on the train if/when you can book a ride home.

Train stations are obviously a mess during this time, and worse, even kind of a health hazard. Every year a few people get crushed or trampled to death. Last year was historically bad because of severe snowstorms that hit a lot of the country; as you can imagine, bus and train schedules were all thrown off and cancellations stretched everything that much thinner.

This year was a good news/bad news year. Many people went home earlier than usual because of job layoffs and factory closures, so it spread out the flow of people a little. But on the flip side, many of those workers aren't even going to bother coming back since they don't have a job to come back to. There are 20 million newly unemployed migrant workers, and many will, for the first time in years, stay in their home provinces instead of returning to the big cities. Going forward, that will put a huge strain on the poorer provinces, since they'll have more mouths to feed and no real boost in resources to do it.

I'll have more on some of the traditions and stuff related with the New Year (mostly the fireworks) in a later post. One of the more interesting things is the concept of a benmingnian; if the New Year is the same sign of the zodiac as you are, it means you gotta watch your back a little. And yes, it is my benmingnian.