100,000 Travelers Stranded at Chinese Train Station

Chinese holidays are known for causing massive traffic jams, like the one that forced 50 lanes of traffic to merge into fewer than 20 or the 10-day jam in 2010 that spawned its own micro economy. But if you think that public transportation is the logical way to solve the problem of getting millions of holiday travelers home, in this case, you’d be wrong.

at least 100,000 travelers were stranded in a Chinese train station due to a bout of bad weather on Monday

176,000 passengers were expected to pass through Guangzhou’s main train station in a single day, as migrant workers continue to return home for the Chinese New Year holiday on February 8. But when snow and ice delayed dozens of trains, the station essentially shut down, leaving hordes of travelers out of luck.

The BBC reports that officials have deployed approximately 5,000 police officers to maintain order. But jams continue to plague other train stations, like the Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station, which South China Morning Post’s Mimi Lau reports is packed with 30,000 people waiting on more than 50 train delays.

Chinese New Year travel is so common that it has its own term—chunyun, or spring migration. It’s been called the world’s largest human migration and is fueled by the country’s enormous number of migrant workers. According to CCTV, China’s state television channel, at least 20 percent of the country’s population is made up of workers who migrate to urban areas to work.

China’s premier recently called for new ways to integrate the country’s nearly 280 million migrant workers into urban areas, to give them better access to public services.