What happens when a billion people go home for the holidays? In China, Lunar New Year Sets Off a Mass Migration:
In an annual phenomenon that makes peak travel seasons in other countries seem trifling, an estimated 430 million Chinese — a third of the country’s population — have taken to land, sea and air over the past two weeks to visit family members or simply get away for the Lunar New Year, which began Saturday. The crush of humanity will reach its peak this weekend, when an official one-week vacation period ends and people return to work.For tens of millions of people, the holiday provides the only opportunity all year to see wives or husbands, sons and daughters. The mass dislocation associated with the holiday has grown since Beijing eased restrictions on movement as part of the program of capitalist reforms begun 25 years ago. But only in the past decade have the numbers become so huge, inflated in large part by farmers such as Ms. Wu who were attracted to better-paying factory and service jobs in the big cities. Chinese experts estimate there are between 90 million and 130 million migrant laborers.
I didn’t realize China now had its own autobahn:
And in an echo of the U.S. Interstate Highway program of the 1950s, China has extended its expressway system from a mere 80 miles in 1988 to more than 12,400 today, leapfrogging Canada and Germany to make it the second-longest system in the world, behind the U.S. Now the vast majority of long-distance travel in China is done on buses.
Amusingly, the Chinese expressway is full of buses. Why not just use trains then?