China has already seen over a billion cross-regional trips made during the first six days of the 2025 Spring Festival travel rush, according to data released by the Ministry of Transportation on Monday.
The travel rush, known as 'chunyun', is considered the world's largest annual human migration and coincides with China's biggest traditional celebration, the Spring Festival, a time when hundreds of millions of people return home for family reunions to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year, which falls on Jan 29 this year.
This massive migration, which began on Jan 14 and continues until Feb 22, is expected to reach a staggering 9 billion passenger trips this year, with both rail and air passenger trips set to hit record highs.
More than 200 million train tickets have been sold so far, while road travel accounts for nearly 80 percent of the total number of trips made to date.
To accommodate the increasing number of electric vehicles on the roads, China's transport ministry has implemented a special holiday highway service area support mechanism to ensure there are adequate charging facilities for new energy vehicles (NEVs).
During this peak travel period, some 7.2 billion road trips and over 90 million civil aviation trips are forecast, while more than 510 million passenger trips are expected to be handled by the country's railways, with an average of 12.75 million daily rail trips being made, an increase of 5.5 percent compared with last year.
To meet the surging demand, China's railway operator has moved to increase its overall passenger transport capacity, which is expected to grow by about 4 percent year on year. An average of over 14,000 passenger trains are being operated on a daily basis during the 40-day travel rush, providing an additional 500,000 seats per day.
Over one billion trips already made as China's Spring Festival travel rush picks up
Over one billion trips already made as China's Spring Festival travel rush picks up
