Travelers at Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport (China).Portal
It's Wednesday lunchtime. In Beijing, subway line 7, which runs from east to west through the center-south of the city, is busier than on other days at the same time. Many passengers are loaded with suitcases and other belongings and at the end of the journey, the Westbahnhof, there is no space left for anything. Dozens of people and numerous children run to the main entrance. One of them is Guo (pseudonym), a man in his 50s who wears an ushanka, the Russian-style hat he uses to protect himself from the cold; He has the tanned complexion typical of the working class and carries a black backpack almost half his size and a huge suitcase. He avoids giving his real name but says he is returning to Baotou, his hometown in northern Inner Mongolia province. It is the first time in four years that he celebrates the Lunar New Year with his family, although, as he assures, during this time he was able to visit them more than once. “Last year it was very dangerous to go back [durante las fiestas]. “There were a lot of infections in the big cities and I didn’t want to risk that,” he says with a thick accent.
Like Guo, millions of migrant workers return to their roots during the 40-day Chunyun travel season, the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year). It is considered the largest annual human migration on the planet and for the Year of the Dragon, which begins on February 10, authorities plan to break all records. According to the Department of Transportation, 9 billion trips will be made between January 26 and March 6. This number triples the 2.98 billion trips in 2019, before the pandemic. Last year, when China faced its worst Covid wave, it counted 1,595 million, the highest number in three calendars. The exponential increase in forecasts is because, according to Beijing, the statistics now include “the volume of passenger vehicles on the road, both on national and provincial roads.”
Chunyun is primarily a mass movement in the homeland for those living abroad, but can also include rest days and tourism. As if summer and Christmas were coming together, children were having a month's vacation, university students were seeing their parents again, and millions of workers living in other provinces were closing up shop and heading back to their roots. For many, it will be the only time of the year that they can combine eight consecutive holidays. The country has nearly 300 million rural migrants, of whom 1,412 million are Chinese, and it is estimated that about a third of Beijing's 22 million residents are technically migrant workers (they do not have the hukou of the capital, China). census system, linked to a person's origin).
In a sense, the travel frenzy can be understood as a thermometer for the economy, employment and consumption: if there is movement, it means that people want to work, have money and return home. Although China's finances have recovered from the ravages of the pandemic (GDP rose 5.2% in 2023), the ghosts of a recession in the housing market have undermined the confidence of households, which did not complete their spending as expected after reopening have. This week, Hong Kong's judicial system ordered the liquidation of Evergrande, China's largest housing company and now the most indebted in the world.
Expectations for the holidays are already high. In 2023, the food service and hospitality sector increased by 14.5% compared to the previous year, one of the largest increases in recent decades, although much of this is due to the very low statistical base of the still cloudy and pandemic year 2022. But there are positive indicators. Compared to 2019, Air China opened 32% more routes and hotel and group travel bookings through the Fliggy agency increased by 160% and 34%, respectively. The Ministry of Transport expects 480 million trips by train, 80 million by plane and 7.2 billion by car. On the first day of Chunyun alone, 189 million trips were made across the country, 19.7% more than in 2023, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
At the Westbahnhof, the lines move quickly in accordance with the instructions of the security staff. At the door, a man from Shaanxi guards his travel bags and those of another couple. “We’re trying to get a ticket. We hope someone cancels and we can travel today,” he says. “This year there are more people and it’s more difficult,” he adds. Liu Qing, 37, a teacher living in the capital, wrote on WeChat that she will travel on New Year's Eve because it was impossible for her to get a ticket to return to her city of Taiyuan before that date. Most of the company's officials and employees are expected to travel on this day.
Many of the trips have to do with the school holidays and the eternal dilemma of working parents: what to do with the children? Bai Jie, a 36-year-old doctor, has just arrived in Sanya with her daughter, who is currently running around on the beach of this tourist town in Hainan, a tropical island in the South China Sea. He will leave them for several weeks in the care of his now-retired grandparents, who bought a seaside apartment ten years ago and spent the winter months here until Covid arrived. “It is the first year we have returned after the pandemic,” says the family in the shade of some palm trees. Bai Jie will soon return to the cold Shanxi province where they live because she has to continue working like her husband.
Many people use Chunyun to rest for a few days. “The constant work is sad,” said Xia Jian, 41, a man who worked in Africa for six years and opened a restaurant in Henan province in 2023, after reopening after the pandemic. He smokes a cigarette and sits on a blanket in the sand. Boats pull huge duck-shaped floating bodies behind them. He likes the place, he goes for walks, rides jet skis. He has good feelings about the economy: “The money is there. The question is whether you are willing to spend it.” There is a hustle and bustle on the beach all around. But Ding Daquan, a 74-year-old retiree who also has an apartment overlooking the sea, assures that there are still “far fewer people” than before the health crisis.
Vincent Chan, China strategist at Aletheia Capital, a Hong Kong-based financial firm, is quite confident that this year will be “good” in terms of tourism. Especially compared to before, when restrictions had already been lifted but infections were spreading across the country. In any case, travel does not necessarily indicate an improvement in confidence in the economy. “The big question concerns other types of consumption, such as buying a car,” he says. Vehicles make up a large portion of retail sales. “They are a different decision than buying a plane ticket,” he adds. “Buying a car is (an act of) large-scale discretionary consumption.” And right now car sales are “not that strong.” He concludes that in 2024 we need to pay attention to whether the Chinese economy shows “real signs” that it has bottomed out and is beginning to recover, particularly in areas linked to “domestic confidence.” , such as mass consumption etc. The ailing market. Property.
For now, concerns about the brick crisis seem to have faded into the background among Chinese travelers. Huang Ning, a 27-year-old Beijing native, plans to break away from his family responsibilities as soon as possible to surf during a week-long vacation in the Philippines. At the capital's train station on Wednesday, four students from Xinjiang University said they had spent a few days visiting Beijing. “It's the first time since we started studying that we've been able to go on a trip with friends and we wanted to take advantage of it while our parents are working. Now we are separated until we resume classes in mid-February,” explains one of them before setting off for his hometown of Wuhan.
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