China's highways carried 227 million passengers during the past Spring Festival holiday week, when millions of Chinese traveled for family gatherings and tourist trips.

 

 

The number of travelers rose 11.6 percent from the same period of last year, with the passenger flow exceeding 50 million per day on Friday and Saturday, when most Chinese started to return home, said the Ministry of Communications.

 

This year's Spring Festival holiday week ran from February 18, China's Lunar New Year, to February 25.

 

The peak continued on Sunday, when an estimated 62.8 million passengers took to the highways, up 23 percent from last year, according to the ministry.

 

The highway division of the ministry said a major part of the passenger flow was rural migrant workers traveling from inland provinces like Henan, Jiangxi, Sichuan and Anhui to Beijing, Tianjin and major cities in the booming eastern and southern coastal regions.

 

The government has made 24-hour highway traffic information available on the Internet and provided weather forecast for highway travelers.

 

Meanwhile, the latest official figures show tourist areas around the country received 92.2 million visitors during the holiday week, 17.7 percent more than the same period of last year.

 

Tourism brought the country 43.8 billion yuan (US$5.48 billion) of revenues this holiday, an increase of 19 percent from 2006.

 

During the holiday, the daily average passenger flow on railways hit a record high, reaching 3.75 million, according to the Ministry of Railways.

 

In the same period, 5 million passengers traveled by water, a 6 percent rise, while the country's airlines carried 3.71million passengers, a surge of 21 percent.

 

(Xinhua News Agency February 26, 2007)