什么是春运？

English (for the teacher)

These days, in just forty days around the Spring Festival each year, people in China make more than nine billion trips between regions. That number is bigger than the population of the whole world. Of course, this counts “trips”, not “people”: one person going back to their home town counts once, and going back to the city after the New Year counts again. Even so, this flow of people is often called the largest periodic human migration on Earth. It has a name of its own: Chunyun.

Chunyun is short for “Spring Festival transport”, and it usually runs from fifteen days before the Spring Festival to twenty-five days after it. The word “Chunyun” began to appear in the People’s Daily in 1980. Back then, the whole of Chunyun came to just over a hundred million trips. Later, with reform and opening up, more and more people left their home towns to work and study in the cities, and Chunyun grew more crowded every year.

Why does everyone insist on travelling in the same few weeks? Because the Spring Festival is the holiday Chinese people care about most. It is also a rare long break, usually more than a week off. Many people live away from home and get only these few days a year to go back; counting only migrant workers who work away from home, that’s around 180 million people. The reunion dinner on New Year’s Eve has to be eaten at home, whatever it takes.

The first hurdle on the way home is the ticket. Twenty or thirty years ago, buying a train ticket mostly meant queuing. Before dawn, long lines snaked outside the ticket halls, with people wrapped in padded coats, carrying little stools and thermos flasks, some queuing all night. When they finally reached the window, the tickets might already be sold out, leaving them to ask someone for a favour or pay extra to a scalper.

In the 2012 Chunyun, every train ticket in the country could be bought online for the first time. The queue moved from the station to the internet, and “buying a ticket” became “grabbing a ticket”. The moment sales open, countless people stare at their phone screens, refreshing again and again. At the busiest point of ticket sales, the railway system can sell over a thousand tickets a second. Missed out? Don’t lose heart: you can join the waitlist, and if someone returns a ticket, the system automatically buys it for someone on the waitlist.

If you really can’t get a seat, there is one more kind of ticket, “no seat”: it costs the same as the cheapest seat, but once you’re on board, you stand the whole way. In the days of the old green trains, Chunyun carriages were crammed, with people packed between the seats and even the toilets and luggage racks full of people. Netizens once voted on the “top ten Chunyun survival tools”: instant noodles came first, and second place went to a little folding stool, so you can sit all the way even on a “no seat” ticket.

Today Chunyun looks very different. There are more and more high-speed trains, and carriages are no longer packed solid. The bigger change is on the roads: during Chunyun, around eight in ten trips are now self-drive. Some people simply turn it around: instead of going back home, they bring their parents to the city for the New Year, and this is called “reverse Chunyun”.

Still, some things never seem to change. The moment they get a ticket, many people’s first move is still to tell Mum and Dad, only now they send a screenshot. The moment you step through the door, the first thing out of Mum’s mouth is often: “You’ve lost weight.” And by the day you head back, the suitcase that came home half full is stuffed with cured pork, sausages and bottle after bottle of chilli sauce.