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)