China's summer rail travel season tops 220 mln passenger trips so far

China's railway network has entered the peak summer travel season, with passenger trips surpassing 220 million as of Thursday, according to official data released on Friday.

The annual summer travel rush began on July 1. Rail operators across the country are expanding capacity to meet surging demand driven by tourism, student travel and family visits.

At Beijing Chaoyang Railway Station, a major hub for services to northeast China, daily passenger volume has reached about twice the normal level. To cope with the surge, the station has activated fast-track security checkpoints, deployed additional staff to guide passengers and optimized transfer routes to reduce waiting times.

"Since the summer travel season began, tourist travel has grown significantly. We have added seven passenger train services each day to popular destinations, including Shenyang, Chifeng, Harbin, Dalian and Changbai Mountain," said Wang Qiang, the station's Party chief.

Railways in the Beijing region handled some 8.83 million passenger trips during the period. Elsewhere, railway operators have also increased train services to meet growing demand.

In the wake of the opening of the Xi'an-Shiyan High-Speed Railway, authorities have scheduled 58 additional high-speed train services linking the tourist city of Xi'an with destinations including Nanyang, Hankou and Chongqing, strengthening connections between the country's northwest, central, southern and southwestern regions.

A new high-speed service between the revolutionary cities of Yan'an and Shaoshan has also been launched, creating a new route for red tourism, which refers to visits to sites and places associated with China's revolutionary history.

Railway authorities have added overnight high-speed trains on Fridays and Sundays for major routes, including the Shanghai-Kunming and Beijing-Hong Kong high-speed railways, allowing passengers to depart in the evening and arrive the following morning.

The 62-day summer travel season is scheduled to run from July 1 to Aug 31, with railways expected to handle 1.01 billion passenger trips, averaging 16.29 million per day.

China's summer rail travel season tops 220 mln passenger trips so far

Nobel Laureate Omar Yaghi has vowed to tackle larger challenges by using artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to make new materials, as he joined China's Tsinghua University, one of China's most prestigious universities.

Yaghi, the 2025 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, left his faculty post at the University of California, Berkeley and joined Tsinghua University on a full-time basis in July 2026.

In his appointment ceremony address, Yaghi said that in choosing Tsinghua, he is ready to begin again, not to slow down, not to repeat what has been done, but to pursue science with more energy, intensity, and ambition than ever before.

In an interview with China Media Group aired on Friday, the professor explained what "beginning again" means to him.

"Begin again means to address an even larger challenge than I've addressed before and this larger challenge has to do with how do we change the way we do research, can we exemplify that by combining AI, robotics and making new materials. But in the meantime, we are communicating to our discipline, in this case, chemistry, material science, that there's a new way to do science, there is a new way to make great discoveries. So the discoveries that we make here impact the world and they are done for the world," he said.

Nobel laureate says he aims to tackle larger challenges by combining AI, robotics