As Chinese New Year or the Spring Festival draws near, Chinese travellers have started to pack into cars, trains and planes, kicking off the landmark Chunyun, the world’s largest annual human migration.
Chinese authorities expect an unprecedented nine billion inter-regional trips during this year’s Spring Festival travel rush. The 40-day travel period began on Jan 14 and will continue through Feb 22. The actual date of the first day of Chinese New Year is on Jan 29 and it is celebrated for 15 days.
More electric car owners and foreign tourists are expected to join the annual travel frenzy, traditionally featuring millions of migrant workers and others living far from their hometowns who head back to reunite with family and celebrate China’s most important festival.
Majority will take road trips
This year, road trips are expected to dominate the annual travel rush, accounting for about 80 per cent of all inter-regional journeys. An estimated 7.2 billion road trips are projected, with highways likely to experience record-breaking single-day traffic peaks.
The rise of carpooling has also become evident on Chinese social media platforms. On the Xiaohongshu lifestyle app, posts marked with the hashtag “carpooling home for Spring Festival” have garnered over 5.6 million views and nearly 180,000 comments.
New energy vehicles (NEVs) are set to be a key feature of this year’s homeward journeys. As of November 2024, a total of 33,100 charging stations have been installed across the country’s highway service areas, with 97 per cent of these areas now equipped with charging facilities, according to the Ministry of Transport.
To accommodate the travel surge, highway service areas are promoting ultrafast charging stations, optimising placement based on traffic volume, and introducing intelligent solutions such as charging robots.
Air and rail operators increase capacities
China’s railway and civil aviation authorities have also increased travel capacities to ensure smoother transportation.
Over 510 million passenger trips will be handled by the country’s railways during the period, with an average of 12.75 million trips daily, an increase of 5.5 per cent compared with the previous year.
China State Railway Group Co., Ltd. plans to operate more than 14,000 passenger trains daily, providing an additional 500,000 seats per day. Ahead of the Spring Festival travel rush, a total of 185 new Fuxing bullet trains have been put into service nationwide, capable of reaching speeds of up to 350 kilometres per hour.
Meanwhile, China’s civil aviation sector is set to handle a record 90 million passenger trips during the holiday travel season. The sector will operate an average of 18,500 flights per day, an 8.4% increase from 2024.
UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage
This year marks the first Spring Festival travel rush since the Chinese New Year was added to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list, as well as the first with an extended eight-day Spring Festival holiday.
The Spring Festival, has also been officially listed as a UN floating holiday in its calendar of conferences and meetings as from 2024. The UN General Assembly invites the UN bodies at headquarters and other duty stations, where observed, to avoid holding meetings on the Chinese New Year.
The dates for the Chinese New Year changes each year as it coincides with the new moon that appears between Jan 21 and Feb 20 each year, this is why the Chinese New Year is also called the Lunar New Year.
Public schools across New York will be celebrating the Lunar New Year on Jan. 29 as an official holiday for the first time. This also makes New York the first state in the U.S. to mandate school closures for the occasion. Many countries in Asia celebrate this new year with public holidays.
Interest in long-haul travel
In the city of Wuhan, a key transport hub in Central China, the Wuhan Tianhe International Airport is expected to handle 3.76 million passenger trips during the holiday travel rush, up 14.6 per cent year on year.
“Ice and snow destinations such as Harbin, Changchun and Shenyang, as well as sunny coastal locations like Haikou, Sanya, Hong Kong and Singapore, are the most popular routes from Wuhan,” said the deputy general manager of the airport.
Online travel giant Ctrip reported a 51-percent year-on-year increase in searches for overseas trips ahead of Chunyun. Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia emerged as the top destinations.
Interest in long-haul travel is also growing, with searches for destinations in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America increasing by more than 50 per cent.
Foreign visitors join in the fun
Spring Festival is also seeing an increase in foreign visitors, with travel orders from international tourists surging by 203 per cent compared to the same period in 2024, partly thanks to China’s expansion of its visa-free transit policy to permit eligible foreign travellers to stay in the country for 240 hours.
An improved payment environment, bilingual signage and various other supports have enhanced the convenience of travelling in China for foreign tourists. The 12306 China Railway online ticketing platform, now accessible to international users, enables them to explore both bustling urban centres and remote destinations with ease.