Nationwide transportation peak continues as Spring Festival travel rush enters Day 12

China

Nationwide transportation peak continues as Spring Festival travel rush enters Day 12

2026-02-13 16:02 Last Updated At：02-14 12:07

China's Spring Festival travel rush continued to remain at high intensity on Friday, the 12th day of the 40-day period that started on Feb 2 this year, as transportation systems nationwide have kept handling surging passenger flows, official data showed.

On Friday, the national railway system is expected to handle 15.1 million passenger trips, and 2,117 additional passenger trains are planned, particularly on popular routes and key sections, to meet rising demand ahead of the Chinese New Year holiday running from Feb 15 to 23.

National highways are operating smoothly despite heavy traffic, with an estimated 42 million vehicle trips on Friday.

Heavy traffic is reported on the Jiangsu section of the Beijing-Shanghai Expressway, the Zhejiang section of the Shanghai-Kunming Expressway, and the Anhui section of the Chuzhou-Xincai Expressway.

In the civil aviation sector, 19,994 flights are expected on the day to manage an estimated 2.46 million passenger trips.

The Spring Festival travel rush, also known as chunyun, is the world's largest annual human migration, as millions embark on journeys across the nation to reunite with loved ones and celebrate the arrival of the Chinese New Year on Feb 17 this year.

China launches Shenzhou-23 manned spaceship

China's Shenzhou-23 crewed spaceship blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the country's northwest on Sunday, sending three astronauts to its orbiting space station.

The spaceship, atop a Long March-2F carrier rocket, lifted off from the launch site at 23:08 Beijing Time (15:08 GMT).

The crew members consist of mission commander Zhu Yangzhu, and fellow astronauts Zhang Zhiyuan and Lai Ka-ying, who is also the first astronaut from China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

In another notable first, one of the crew members is set to undertake a year-long stay aboard the space station, double the usual duration of previous Shenzhou missions.

After entering orbit, the Shenzhou-23 spaceship will perform a fast automated rendezvous and docking with the radial port of the space station core module Tianhe, forming a combination of three modules and three spacecraft.

Shenzhou-23 marks the 40th flight of China's manned spaceflight program and the seventh manned flight mission since the Tiangong space station entered its application and development phase in late 2022.