The Spring Festival, or lunar New Year, is China's most important traditional festival, and it will fall on January 22 this year. A great number of Chinese residents, migrate workers, college students, employees working outside their native places are busy traveling for going home to enjoy their family reunion.

However, many of them are still worried about homebound tickets. The majority of passengers depend on the train for their long-distance journeys, but it is so difficult for them to buy a train ticket that they have to be lining up in the railway station for hours, or trust someone who has contact or any kind of relationship with railway authorities.

Insufficient transportation ability

The Spring Festival mass transportation usually lasts 40 days every year. This year, it started from January 8. In Beijing, over 280,000 people started their train journeys from Beijing on January 10, according to a local media report, while over 3.5 million passengers boarded trains nationwide. The railway stations, airports and long-distance bus terminals in east China's Shanghai, south China's Guangzhou, and other main cities were also inundated by crowds.

The passenger flow during the Spring Festival period is usually imbalanced. Before the Spring Festival, passengers usually gather in Beijing and east China's developed coastal cities. In Shanghai, all the passengers flow to the west side, while in Guangzhou, passengers move northward. In Beijing, the passengers move to everywhere, basically from urban to rural areas. The passenger flow will be on adverse directions after the Spring Festival.

Weeks ago, the State Development and Reform Commission forecast that the passenger flow during this Spring Festival will reach 1.89 billion, up 3 percent over last year. Among them, the train passengers are about 137 million; bus passengers, 1.717 billion; ship travelers, 26 million; and airplane passengers, 10.5 million.

Familiar words

"Have you got your ticket?" The question is asked frequently in recent days when friends or colleagues meet. During the Spring Festival period every year, "ticket" is always something causing headache.

Chunyun, or "passenger transport during the Spring Festival," a term first appeared a decade ago, is a popular word in current Chinese society. Transportation authorities have to mobilize all their forces to ensure the run of the nation's transport system during Spring Festival.

To get their tickets, many passengers seek help from their connections at railway stations or ticket booking offices. "Every year, when the Spring Festival approaches, the last thing we want to do is to answer phone calls, which are mostly from relatives, friends, and even friends' friends who need tickets," an employee in the railway sector complained.

Scalpers were usually rampant during the Spring Festival traffic peak. Passengers usually would have to pay additional charges for homebound tickets. Even worse, what they receive are often fake tickets, despite police's enforced crackdown on this kind of illegal activities during the festival season.

As China moves to a market-oriented economy, the Chinese can buy any product if they have enough money, but transport tickets for the Spring Festival holiday trips are excepted. As noted by the Chinese press, this special product may probably remain as China's last piece of commodity in short supply.

Strained transportation will last

Even after all other shortages are solved thanks to the market-oriented reform, the insufficient supply of transportation services is unlikely to end in the near future.

"It can't be solved in the next five to 10 years, and the Spring Festival mass transportation will last longer," forecast Ma Liqiang, director of Economic Operation Bureau under the State Development and Reform Commission. He said that the weak railway infrastructure and insufficient transportation ability is the cause of ticket scarcity in the Spring Festival period.

Economist Liang Xiaomin attributes it to the following three reasons. First, Chinese tradition, family members should go home for reunion at the lunar New Year eve; second, lots of rural labor rushing to cities for jobs have not yet settled down in their working places, so they have to go home for the Spring Festival; third, air transportation is now small-scaled and the lack of expressways limits the volume of road transportation.

Another well-known economist Chen Zhun, on the other hand, calls for more private capital participation in railway construction, saying that it can make up the insufficiency of governmental transportation ability.

(China.org.cn by Tang Fuchun, January 18, 2003)