BEIJING: At Beijing South railway station, there was excited chatter among passengers waiting to return to their hometowns for the Chinese New Year break – the first time in three years that the Chinese are able to celebrate the country’s biggest holiday without Covid-19 restrictions.
“I’m most excited about the reunion dinner, which is the biggest we have had since the pandemic started,” Li Jifu, 37, said at the capital city’s largest train station that mainly serves high-speed trains.
“We are having extra dishes this year because relatives are planning to visit my family and I,” added Li, a restaurant manager who was waiting for his train to Tianjin, a municipal city north of Beijing.
Cashier Li Weiru, 22, who was returning to Qingdao in Shandong province, said: “I haven’t seen my nephew since he was born in late 2021. The Covid-19 outbreaks were quite bad last year, so I didn’t go home to celebrate his first month or his first birthday.
“I’ve bought some toys and books for him. He already has a lot, but I feel like I need to make up for lost time,” she said.
For three years, China’s pandemic restrictions that included quarantines, mass testing and flash lockdowns, had made many think twice about going home for fear of being barred from returning to work.
But in an abrupt turnabout, health authorities lifted the curbs in early December.
Official data on Wednesday showed 480 million trips had been made so far since chun yun – or the Spring Festival travel rush – started on Jan 7. Chun yun is the world’s largest human migration.
The figure is a 47.1% increase from that in 2020, the first CNY after Covid-19 first broke out in the country. Still, compared with pre-pandemic 2019, trips are down by 47.3%.
An estimated 2.1 billion trips are expected to be made during chun yun, which will last for 40 days.
At its peak, about three billion trips – equivalent to China’s entire population moving twice – were made annually.
SMC China, which makes filters and other plant equipment, expects 80% of its 5,000 workers in Beijing to return home this CNY.
General manager Ma Qinghai said: “The Spring Festival is very important to us Chinese, so we would usually always arrange for workers to go back during the holidays and not have them work during this period.”
In the past two years, up to 80% of workers stayed in Beijing during the festival, largely due to Covid-19 restrictions. — The Straits TImes/ANN
