China’s massive Lunar New Year travel rush has begun early this year with hordes of migrant workers streaming out of cities where jobs have dried up because of a slowing economy, state media said yesterday.
The Lunar New Year for this year falls on Jan. 26, but the annual exodus is already under way in major cities, with many of China’s millions of migrant laborers heading home to an uncertain future, Xinhua news agency said.
The Beijing West Railway Station logged 130,000 departing passengers on Thursday, 38,000 more than the daily average, Xinhua quoted station authorities as saying.
It quoted officials who “cited the lack of big construction projects in the capital city as the reason for the increased seasonal travel,” although this year’s relatively early Lunar New Year holiday was also a factor.
Long queues also developed at railway hubs in the eastern commercial metropolis of Shanghai, with police dispatched to maintain order, it said.
State media said previously that a record 2.3 billion passenger trips were expected to be taken during the Lunar New Year period, the country’s most important holiday.
A record 188 million people will take to the nation’s rail system and another 24 million will take holiday-related flights this month and next month, the reports said, in what is the world’s biggest annual migration.
The impact of the global economic crisis was expected to boost this year’s travel rush.
The millions of workers who have migrated from poor and rural regions to the country’s cities and coastal manufacturing regions have played a vital role in China’s recent economic expansion.
But slowing overseas demand for Chinese products has already shuttered many factories and was expected to throw millions out of work.
The yearly exodus is marked by chaotic scenes as masses of Chinese desperate to return home overwhelm the nation’s transport grid.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS