Chinese Sphere: Ringing in the New Year

For Chinese communities around the world, this week marks the beginning of a week-long holiday to mark Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival as it is usually called. The significance of the holiday is on the same level as Christmas for the Western world and also involves family reunions in one’s hometown. One of the phenomena associated with the Spring Festival is the massive outflow of people from the cities where they work back to their hometowns. Even in an island as small as Taiwan, every time Chinese New Year rolled around there would be massive traffic jams on the highways with hundreds of thousands of people leaving Taipei for their hometowns down south. The scale of the travel situation in China is even more mind-boggling where you have an estimated 188 million people making the journey home, and that is only for the railways.

A blog posting in China comparing the differences between how holiday travel is handled in the U.S. and China has struck a chord, receiving over 100,000 views and 1,100 comments. Popular novelist and former Atlantic Council senior fellow Yang Hengjun attributes China’s travel problems to two main factors: 1. The inability of regular citizens to change their official residence (known as hukou in Mandarin) which greatly limits the social services that migrant workers and their families can access outside of their hometown. This often ends up separating parents from their children who can only receive schooling in their hometowns. 2. Train and airplane tickets are snatched up by those with special connections to the government.

Yang writes, “Unlimited authority, abuse of power, an unfair system, monopolistic corporations, social inequality, and corruption has made the Chinese New Year travel rush not a transportation problem, but a social and political one. That is what causes so many people to get angry! … In the U.S., apart from a small minority of government officials who are traveling for business dealing with national interests, those who are traveling for personal reasons are all treated the same in the purchasing of tickets. Even if you were traveling on business for your company or the government, you need to go through the same process as an illegal immigrant worker in a Chinese restaurant: purchase tickets online or line up at the counter, first come first serve. … In China, one’s level in society basically determines whether you are able to get a ticket, and the highest level is, obviously, the ‘servants of the people.’ Have you ever heard any public servant or their family members complain about not being able to get tickets?”

For Taiwanese businessmen working on the other side of the Strait, the new year usually means either getting on a plane back home or flying one’s wife and kids out to China. However, the global financial crisis has changed this dynamic this year. An article in Commonwealth, the leading general affairs magazine in Taiwan, explains how economic difficulties in China have affected cross-strait travel: “The Fu-hsing Travel Agency pointed out that in the past there would always be tons of people flying to the mainland to visit relatives or go on tours, and demand for seats outstripped supply. This year that demand has decreased significantly. ‘There are already airline companies that are selling direct flights to Shenzhen for an extremely low price of NT$7,000 [approx. US$212], but this still hasn’t attracted any buyers,’ a representative from the travel agency said.

This year, China-based Taiwanese businessmen will have a particularly cold Spring Festival. Those who are unlucky have been laid off and sent back to Taiwan. Some are temporarily unable to reunite with their family.

Mr. Chen, who has been ‘recalled’ to Taiwan, said with a note of sarcasm, ‘This year it’s my turn to go back to Taiwan to see my family. During the past decade, whether Taiwanese businessmen spent their Chinese new year in Taiwan or China was an indicator of which location was more attractive. Mr. Chen plans to see how things go in Taiwan for the next year or two, and then make a decision once the economy recovers.

‘It’s hard to say whether I’ll return to the mainland. After this shuffling of the deck, I think new opportunities will appear on both sides,’ Chen said optimistically.”