China: World’s largest human migration sets new record

Chinese New Year

As the Chinese New Year holiday nears its end, the number of travelers on the railways and roads is surging again. CCTV’s Nie Jia reported this story.


CCTV America analyzed data from Xinhua News and AAA to arrive at these percentages. Xinhua reported that 1.15 billion trips have been taken during the weeklong Spring Festival, while AAA estimated 89.5 million Americans traveled 50 miles or more between Dec. 23, 2014-Jan. 4, 2015. Since the China stat measures trips and not people, we made a rough estimate by dividing the number of trips in half to arrive at an estimated number of people who went on round-trip visits. Admittedly, this doesn’t capture those who took one-way or multiple trips, but we felt it gives us a better approximation for comparing. We then divided these numbers by the total population of each country.

The China Railway Corporation says more than a million railway trips were made nationwide on Tuesday, a new record for Spring Festival travel.
Hundreds of millions of people who went home for the Spring Festival are now starting their return journeys.

In Jinan railway station in the east of China, train tickets to Beijing are sold out. And trains to other major cities have only standing-room tickets available. Railways are advising passengers to arrive at the station as early as possible.

“We sold over 27,000 tickets on the internet on Tuesday. About 16,000 tickets haven’t been collected yet. We advise people to collect their tickets soon so there won’t be too many crowds gathering at one time. Passengers should also try to avoid the travel peak,” said Jinan Railway Station staff member Wang Yixin.

Heavy snow closed major expressways in the northeast on Monday. Some of them reopened temporarily. But only cars were able to get through, while tourist buses were stranded.

“We activated a contingency plan with transport police and used road administration vehicles and police cars to escort the buses back to Harbin,” said Deputy Director of Heilongjiang Expressway Bureau, Gu Feng.

About 8.5 million people traveled by train on Monday, while nearly 60 million took to the roads. Since Spring Festival Travel began, there have been 1.15 billion trips. The Chinese transportation authorities held a national video conference on Monday pledging quick responses to bad weather and accidents, and promising prompt release of traffic information.