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在线翻译:
szdaily -> In depth -> 
The dilemma of Spring Festival travel rush
    2014-01-28  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

    WHEN many Chinese are struggling to get home during the annual Spring Festival travel rush, Ms. Sun, a teacher working in Shenzhen, has been praised by netizens for her ingenuity in getting home.

    Having failed to buy a train ticket back to her hometown in northeastern Liaoning Province, Sun resorted to an indirect way — she bought six train tickets and a boat ticket, which will take her through six provinces on the way to her hometown.

    Ms. Sun’s journey may be inspiring to the many who are still trying to snap up a train ticket from the chaotic official website, but it also reflects some of the problems that China has been facing for years.

    Dubbed the “largest annual migration,” China’s Spring Festival travel season is bracing for a record 3.6 billion passenger load this year, 200 million more than the previous year, according to a press conference held a week ago.

    And as the major means of long-distance transport, China’s trains are again under fire for their insufficient capacity. Hu Yadong, deputy general manager of China Railway Corp., said there is “no timetable” to solve the problem of ticket-buying, back-tracking the promises the now-defunct Ministry of Railways made in previous years to settle the problem.

    There will be 258 million railway passengers traveling this year, an increase of 7.9 percent on the previous year. “There is still a huge gap between the railway capacity and demand,” said Hu at the press conference.

    The Spring Festival travel rush is a reflection of China’s economic growth and social mobility. According to the Economic Daily, the travel rush has been on the rise since the 1950s, growing with the economy.

    While the colossal movement epitomizes China’s social migration and bears witness to its economic growth, it also brings to light, rather paradoxically, the economic and social problems the nation is facing.

    The first and most notable problem is the discrepancy in regional development. Many of the passengers are migrant workers, who travel yearly from the affluent eastern and coastal regions to their hometowns in the underdeveloped provinces.

    A second problem is the rigid household registration system. Though China’s National Bureau of Statistics reported a 52.57 percent urbanization rate by the end of 2012, a research conducted by China’s Tsinghua University last October found that the registered urban population was only 27.6 percent, revealing a large population who are denied citizenship in the places where they work.

    In addition to the economic imbalance and household registration system, there is also another facet to the travel rush — Chinese people enjoy very few holidays. Though China has been advocating paid holidays for a long time, the Spring Festival, apart from the Golden Week (7-day national holiday), still remains one of the only occasions when Chinese can get together and have a break from their over-worked lives.(SD-Agencies)

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