As of: March 6, 2024, 5:41 p.m
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It was full on China's streets and on China's trains: On Tuesday, the travel period around the Spring Festival ended with a record.
This Tuesday, the 40-day travel period surrounding the Chinese Spring Festival came to an end with a new record: Never before in human history have so many people traveled so much in such a short time as in the past few weeks.
As Chinese state media report, citing the Chinese Ministry of Transport, an estimated 8.4 billion individual trips were made between January 28 and March 5, almost twice as many as in the previous year and around three times as many as in the years before the corona pandemic.
Original forecasts even assumed nine billion trips.
While around three billion trips were counted annually between 2015 and 2020 during the period called “Chunyun”, in the Corona years 2021 and 2022 there were only 870 million and 1.05 billion trips respectively.
Only after the Chinese government's strict Corona measures ended did the number climb again significantly last year and, at 4.7 billion trips, significantly exceeded the long-term average.
This year around 480 million passengers used the railway and 83 million the plane.
Around 29 million people traveled by ship.
The vast majority of journeys were made by car or bus.
The Chinese Spring Festival
China and other countries in the region traditionally start the new year with the Spring Festival.
It always falls on a new moon between January 21st and February 21st.
This year the new year started on February 10th.
Each year is assigned one of the twelve Chinese zodiac signs and one of the five elements of wood, fire, earth, metal and water.
This year is marked by the Wood Dragon and is considered particularly auspicious according to astrologers.
China: People are increasingly using their own cars
According to the Chinese business portal 21Jingji,
one reason for the increase this year is
a lot of pent-up demand after the end of the corona pandemic.
The government in Beijing had already lifted the so-called zero-Covid policy at the end of 2022, thus making unhindered travel possible again after more than two years;
However, at the New Year celebrations that followed, many Chinese people were still worried about becoming infected with the coronavirus.
Today, however, the risk of infection in China, as in the rest of the world, is only slightly present.
The massive increase is apparently also due to a change in the counting method.
According to the Chinese Academy of Transport Sciences CATS, before 2023 only trips by public transport - i.e. train, plane, ship or bus - were included in the statistics.
Last year, trips in minibuses and private cars on motorways were initially counted, and this year also trips on country roads.
At the same time, the total number of trips is increasing because more and more people are traveling in their own cars - according to CATS, a consequence of the corona pandemic: "The public's demand for safety, privacy and convenience when traveling has increased significantly," say the scientists.
As
21Jingji
writes, in 2019, 65 percent of all trips during the Spring Festival were made in your own car.
This year it was more than 90 percent, according to data from the Chinese Ministry of Transport.
(sh)