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Exit the Dragon
By Liu Linlin Source:Global Times Published: 2013-2-8 0:43:00
A man prays at a temple as it snows in Shanghai on Thursday ahead of Spring Festival. Preparations continue for lunar new year, which will celebrate the start of the Year of the Snake on Sunday. Photo: AFP
Hundreds of millions of Chinese are heading home for the world's biggest collective family reunion on Chinese New Year, which falls on Sunday this year, leaving previously heavily-populated mega cities, as they bid farewell to the Year of the Dragon.
About 6.43 million people Thursday were expected to travel by train, according to a newsletter sent to the Global Times from the Ministry of Railways (MOR).
The MOR said there will be more peaks in short-distance trips over the next two days and it has arranged temporary trains to ease the pressure.
As a major means of transportation in the country, the railway system is a yardstick for measuring the Spring Festival travel rush, during which people struggle to get tickets home amid mounting anxiety and vent their frustrations over the loopholes in the rail sector.
While people struggle on their way home, cities leaning heavily on migrant work forces have already experienced "holiday coldness."
In South China's manufacturing city Dongguan, about three-quarters of the city's population are migrants. With the approach of the traditional holiday, the once crowded city becomes almost empty, and some local residents have been complaining about the inconveniences as a result of the outflow of migrant workers, who are a pillar of the service sector, according to the Guangzhou Daily.
The phenomenon is the result of the imbalanced distribution of resources in different regions, and to some extent, people's dissatisfaction over the problem breaks out during the seven-day festive holiday, Tian Yun, an economist with the China Society of Macroeconomics under the National Development and Reform Commission, told the Global Times on Thursday.
"When Spring Festival approaches, it reminds us that the figures showing China has become highly urbanized, with the urbanization rate surpassing 50 percent, are just a false impression," Tian said, adding that with restraints from the rigid house registration system, rocketing property prices in cities and other problems, it is difficult for migrant workers to really fit in to the cities.
In a recent survey conducted on an online recruitment platform whose users are grass-roots workers, 66.8 percent of the 13,578 respondents who mostly work in manufacturing and service industries go back to their hometowns for Spring Festival, with 51.7 percent of them reluctant to return to their current employers and 26.6 percent of them choosing not to return to the cities where they had migrated to, the China Youth Daily reported.
"A majority of blue-collar workers have realized that big cities are not suitable for them to stay in for a long time and the development speed of cities in central and western China has in some ways surpassed that of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. So they may choose to work close to their hometowns and the huge migration during the festival might be reduced in the future," Tian said.
The central authority is already well aware of the situation and expressed its resolution to build a coordinated regional development mechanism by 2020 at the 18th Party Congress in November last year.
In the report given by former Party chief Hu Jintao, he pointed out that one of the major difficulties ahead for the country is unbalanced development with huge gaps between urban and rural areas in incomes and development.
And he vowed that the Party will work to establish a fair social welfare system with fair rights, opportunities and rules.
However, Yu Jianrong, head of the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, sees the Spring Festival as something more similar to a religious pilgrimage.
"It's true that urbanization causes migration but there's not really much governments can do to ease travel problems during the period, because as long as people living in the cities have families in their hometowns, they will always want to go back home during Spring Festival. It is not like other holidays where the government can make arrangements to avoid travel peaks and the resulting shortage of labor in big cities," Yu told the Global Times.
Liu Sha contributed to this story
Hundreds of millions of Chinese are heading home for the world's biggest collective family reunion on Chinese New Year, which falls on Sunday this year, leaving previously heavily-populated mega cities, as they bid farewell to the Year of the Dragon.
About 6.43 million people Thursday were expected to travel by train, according to a newsletter sent to the Global Times from the Ministry of Railways (MOR).
The MOR said there will be more peaks in short-distance trips over the next two days and it has arranged temporary trains to ease the pressure.
As a major means of transportation in the country, the railway system is a yardstick for measuring the Spring Festival travel rush, during which people struggle to get tickets home amid mounting anxiety and vent their frustrations over the loopholes in the rail sector.
While people struggle on their way home, cities leaning heavily on migrant work forces have already experienced "holiday coldness."
In South China's manufacturing city Dongguan, about three-quarters of the city's population are migrants. With the approach of the traditional holiday, the once crowded city becomes almost empty, and some local residents have been complaining about the inconveniences as a result of the outflow of migrant workers, who are a pillar of the service sector, according to the Guangzhou Daily.
The phenomenon is the result of the imbalanced distribution of resources in different regions, and to some extent, people's dissatisfaction over the problem breaks out during the seven-day festive holiday, Tian Yun, an economist with the China Society of Macroeconomics under the National Development and Reform Commission, told the Global Times on Thursday.
"When Spring Festival approaches, it reminds us that the figures showing China has become highly urbanized, with the urbanization rate surpassing 50 percent, are just a false impression," Tian said, adding that with restraints from the rigid house registration system, rocketing property prices in cities and other problems, it is difficult for migrant workers to really fit in to the cities.
In a recent survey conducted on an online recruitment platform whose users are grass-roots workers, 66.8 percent of the 13,578 respondents who mostly work in manufacturing and service industries go back to their hometowns for Spring Festival, with 51.7 percent of them reluctant to return to their current employers and 26.6 percent of them choosing not to return to the cities where they had migrated to, the China Youth Daily reported.
"A majority of blue-collar workers have realized that big cities are not suitable for them to stay in for a long time and the development speed of cities in central and western China has in some ways surpassed that of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. So they may choose to work close to their hometowns and the huge migration during the festival might be reduced in the future," Tian said.
The central authority is already well aware of the situation and expressed its resolution to build a coordinated regional development mechanism by 2020 at the 18th Party Congress in November last year.
In the report given by former Party chief Hu Jintao, he pointed out that one of the major difficulties ahead for the country is unbalanced development with huge gaps between urban and rural areas in incomes and development.
And he vowed that the Party will work to establish a fair social welfare system with fair rights, opportunities and rules.
However, Yu Jianrong, head of the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, sees the Spring Festival as something more similar to a religious pilgrimage.
"It's true that urbanization causes migration but there's not really much governments can do to ease travel problems during the period, because as long as people living in the cities have families in their hometowns, they will always want to go back home during Spring Festival. It is not like other holidays where the government can make arrangements to avoid travel peaks and the resulting shortage of labor in big cities," Yu told the Global Times.
Liu Sha contributed to this story
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