InsIdetheWorld’s largest trek

XU Zhengming was lugging a 36-inch flat-screen television through the Beijing West Railway Station on his way home for China’s Lunar New Year. Another passenger was hauling a tub of meat. And many migrant workers returning to their home villages carried bundles of clothes and gifts for children they see maybe once a year.

They all said that they could not go home empty-handed for China’s biggest holiday. Even if that meant carting a television for two days across 1,609 kilometres.

“I get to go back just once a year. It’s a long way,” Xu said as he heaved the television, bundled in protective clothing, through the railway station. He was headed to a village outside Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern province of Sichuan, a journey he estimated would take about 20 hours.

“My father is in the countryside and the family is hard up,” said Xu, a middleaged construction labourer in Beijing, the Chinese capital. “He always wanted a flatscreen television, so I’m taking mine home to give him.”

He and most other passengers at this cavernous, thrumming station were among hundreds of millions of Chinese on the move for the Lunar New Year. Many wore red hats or scarves, the colour of good luck. While the total number of holiday travellers is hard to pin down, this is the world’s largest annual migration.

Zhang Kemin, a restaurant worker dragging a plastic tub holding about 8 kilogrammes of beef and lamb, said he was taking the meat home to Hebei Province, adjacent to Beijing, to make boiled dumplings filled with a mix of meat and vegetables, an essential part of the holiday food in northern China. “There’s pork at home,” he explained.

In the days before the holiday, big cities, like Beijing, and the coastal industrial regions exhale tens of millions of workers who head back to their hometowns and villages by train, plane, bus, car and motorbike for this family holiday of marathon eating, fireworks and paying respects to relatives. This year, the festivities start on Friday evening, when the country says goodbye to the Year of the Rooster and welcomes the Year of the Dog.

On Thursday, the Beijing West Railway Station hummed like a giant boot camp, with the police, paramilitary troops and station staff members hustling passengers into waiting rooms to be corralled onto trains. Workers at the station said the holiday rush was more orderly than a decade ago, when heaving crowds threatened to overwhelm stations.

“It used to be crazy, but it’s a lot better now,” said Yang Guibao, a bald 64-yearold cleaner at the station. “They add many more trains for the Spring Festival and the passengers don’t have to be so packed,” he said, using another name for the Lunar New Year.

With a wag of his finger, he warned, “There are still pickpockets around but there are also plainclothes cops.”

China’s trains have become more numerous and faster than even a few years ago. More people go by car or plane, and they are not as bent on all going home at the same time. Some visit at quieter times of the year. China’s expanding high-speed rail network now covers 20,117km of track. The railway administration has cracked down on ticket scalpers and it has become common to order tickets online or from vending machines. Passengers on a train heading from Beijing to Chongqing, a 30-hour trip of more than a thousand kilometres.

So while the holiday migration is still daunting, it’s not as crazy as before.

“Before it took a day on a train but now, it takes three and a half hours,” said Zhang Guiping, a 62-year-old businesswoman waiting for a train to Fuping, a county in Hebei Province. She said she had been in Beijing petitioning the government over a land dispute. Despite her feud with officialdom, she said she was happy with the better trains.

“There are more trains, the security checks take less time and it’s easier to buy tickets,” she said.

The Chinese transportation authorities have estimated that people will make close to three billion journeys over this Lunar New Year travel period, including 356 million trips by train. But those numbers can sound misleadingly large. Many people take multiple journeys — by train and bus — to get home and then return to work, so the actual number of bodies on the move is lower than those numbers may suggest.

That does not mean that the holiday rush is a tranquil experience.

The Beijing West Railway Station, in particular, is an unsightly monument to poor planning that opened in 1996, and its construction was blighted by corruption. Officials estimated that in the 40-day holiday travel period that began in midJanuary, the station would send off 11.8 million passengers, six per cent more than last year, Chinese state radio reported.

People must steel themselves for big crowds, and then they scramble to jump on trains and find space for the gifts and treats that many take home. The official Lunar New Year break lasts a week but the traditional festival ends after its 15th day. Many migrant workers from the countryside linger at home for precious time with children and parents, whom they rarely or never see the rest of the year.

But Wang Tianchang, a 32-year-old migrant labourer who had been sleeping on a sack of bedding in a train station waiting room, said he was not taking home any gifts for his children. His boss on a building site had not paid him US$150 (RM 589) owed in wages.

“Things are expensive here. I haven’t bought a thing,” he said. But he said: “It’s really important to go home for the Spring Festival. You can see your wife and children.”