The Social Impact of the CNY Travel Ban
China urged its citizens to stay put for the lunar new year celebrations. For many, this means missing out on more than just red packets and parties.
The Chinese New Year period - also known as Spring Festival or Chunyun - is the period of the largest yearly human migration on the planet, with millions of people travelling to the hometowns and ancestral villages for around 2 weeks to ring in the new year. Though the new year has technically passed (12th February), the designated travel period is usually around a month long (28th January to 8th March), giving people enough time to get in, reconnect properly, and get back out to work again.
In 2020, the number of trips was already half the usual amount (around 1.5 billion as opposed to the usual 3 billion) due to fears about the virus, but as life has slowly returned to normal over the past few months, people have been hoping that the Chunyun travel period would be viable once again. However, as a few cities have had to go back into lockdown due to the resurgence of the virus, the government has taken more proactive measures to curb travel.
This means that China’s megacities like Shanghai, usually empty over this period, remain packed. Businesses that would normally close have had to stay open to cater to the unusual demand. This must be a strange scene for those who are used to basically having whole cities to themselves over this period. Eons ago when I studied in China I travelled to Xi’an and Beijing over the new year period, and my tour group were the only people at both the Terracotta Warriors and the Great Wall of China. Seriously, not a single soul in sight (except for the lady selling snacks).
A picture I took inside the Forbidden City in February 2012
Me on the deserted Great Wall, February 2012
It seems that in China, travelling home for new year is taken a lot more seriously than, say, visiting your relatives for Christmas. While both have deep social and personal meaning, Spring Festival has a significance that is unmatched by Western national holidays. To understand that significance, we should look at not only the conditions people travel in just to visit family once a year, but what they would be missing out on if they don’t travel home for the new year. What is the true significance of the yearly migration, whose lives are being impacted by yet another year of restrictions, and how?
人山人海 - Mountains of people; Seas of people
The people who travel for the Spring Festival range from those travelling abroad for a holiday to those going to their ancestral villages to bring gifts to their families. However, the majority of those who travel home for the new year are migrant workers: those who have travelled from the countryside to city centres without a permanent residency and who usually work in blue collar jobs such as manual labour, service workers, and domestic helpers.
Numbering around 277.5 million, they make up roughly 33% of China’s workforce. Without official urban residency - or an urban hukou - many of them leave behind children and ageing parents in the countryside while they work, with roughly 70 million children in China designated as left-behind children with one or both parents living temporarily in urban areas for better paid jobs.
Many of these urban workers have neither the time nor the money to visit their hometowns and families outside of the new year period. While some urbanites have taken the travel restrictions as an opportunity to visit the suburbs of large cities, see the sights, stay in B&Bs and try and relax over the holiday, many poorer migrants don’t have this luxury. Many are risking the journey back home regardless of restrictions, queuing for hours to get a negative test to ensure they would be allowed back into their home counties. All this, despite having to suffer uncomfortable cramped conditions, days of travel, and relatively brief reunions.
When I travelled during this period, I was lucky enough to snag ‘soft sleeper’ seats, the most expensive type of seats where you get your own bed and share a cabin with 3 other passengers (around £10 at the time if I remember correctly). Though I did have to queue in the snow for a couple of hours to get my tickets (pre-decent internet on the mainland), I was always able to get one, as I was travelling to big cities as opposed to the sticks.
Most migrant workers unfortunately can not afford the luxury of a soft sleeper, or a hard sleeper... or often even a seat in general. Many people are forced to buy standing tickets for 15-20 hour journeys in train compartments so cramped that they cannot sleep or use the restroom. They risk injury, theft, hunger, and general unpleasantness:
“After getting tickets, sometimes you don’t have a seat. Several people are crammed in one seat, and the aisles are full of people. Many migrants like us go home in the festival season, all carrying their quilts. You cannot move at all, let alone go to the restroom ... When you need to go to the restroom or get some water, the whole compartment of people stops you from moving. You may feel sleepy at night, but have to sit on the floor. People even sleep under the seats. There are just too many people.” (Meng, 2014)
Apart from suffering from exhaustion, bruising, and soreness, many of these travellers still have onward journeys when they reach their terminus. Carrying luggage and gifts - and sometimes all of their belongings due to the temporary nature of their work - some travel days in icy conditions, with nothing but the thought of home motivating them to go on.
Often travellers are able to build up a camaraderie during their journey, a sense of community fostered by their shared plight and discomfort. They discuss their plans for the holidays, play games, and watch shows on the compartment’s television together as one big group. Some services during this period actively acknowledge this temporary community, greeting the passengers:
“If a train ticket is an invitation, you are our distinguished guests. Welcome to the train, our temporary big family...Our journey starts now and here, but our friendship will extend endlessly with the radio waves. You will make new friends on the train. As an old saying goes, “To treasure this encounter even though we are strangers.” It was destined that we would get together on the train.” (Meng, 2014)
But for some of us (I’m thinking specifically of my pampered Western self), this whole situation just begs the question: Why bother? Is all of this struggle and hardship really worth it for just a few days at home? What would you really be missing out on if you simply didn’t go?
父母在,不远游,游必有方 “When your parents are alive, do not travel far. If you must travel, be sure to have a specific destination.” - Confucius
The nature of migrant work means that the idea of city living is not one of permanence, and there is always the idea of returning home some day. The journey back home is not just to maintain family bonds, it’s also part of maintaining the self.
In one paper I read, the interviewer seemed bemused by a couple who had made a comfortable life for themselves in the city, much to the envy of many of their friends, but still travelled to their hometown regularly to maintain their old home.
Yet to my surprise, the couple still went home every two or three years to visit relatives and take care of their shabby old house in the countryside. When asked why the trip was necessary, the couple explained that the village is their “old root.” The old house in the village cannot be replaced by any other “homes,” including the new apartment in the city. “No one will work as a migrant for the entire life,” Mingxia said. “The old home is the only place we will finally return.” (Meng, 2014)
The couple may decide to stay in their cosy Beijing apartment into their old age, but their home in the countryside is more than a house. It’s a symbol of their attachment to their ancestry, and provides them with a link that ultimately forms part of their identity. They do not identify as urbanites, and they view their status as migrant workers as only temporary. Their home is where their heart is.
Even for young people who have moved to the city and could possibly convert their hukou to urban status one day, returning home still provides multiple benefits and comforts that are too good to pass up. Not only is the countryside seen by many as a welcome break from the indifference of city living and long working hours, the bonds and connections with those back home are seen as more ‘real’ or ‘permanent’ than those forged in the city, even with other migrant workers.
A journey home is a chance to repair bonds between parents with left-behind children, older children with ageing parents, and married couples that have been fractured by time and space. It’s also a time to sit back and take stock of life, and possibly come up with the answers to a number of life changing questions:
“Should I continue the same job or not next year? Should I send my children back for school in the countryside? Can I still work in the city if my parents find a fiance ́ for me during the festival?” (Meng, 2014)
These sorts of questions represent the uncertainty and impermanence of the lives of many migrant workers.
Of course, not everybody wants to go home. Some people don’t get on with their families, feel pressured because they’re still single and may be forced to meet someone by their parents, or simply want to stay in the city to make more money over the holiday period. Many also feel overburdened by the need to provide expensive presents for their families due to their higher paying jobs. The need to ‘save face’ (mianzi) and show that they are thriving in the city just adds pressure to those who may already be facing other problems in terms of loneliness or exploitation.
Others still just want to avoid the crushing conditions of travel, and opt instead for their families to come visit them in the cities. This new trend, known as the reverse Spring Festival travel rush, mainly affects cities with high populations and high GDPs such as Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangzhou, and Beijing. As of 2020, this trend has been growing at a rate of around 30% per year for the past two years, and due to restrictions placed on travel this year, such trends may become normalised over the next decade or so. This is especially as younger workers gain more capital, can afford better living conditions in cities, and shirk returning to poorer conditions in the countryside when they can just treat their older relatives to a good time in the big city.
But to those who brave long drives, cramped trains, boring bus rides, and busy airport terminals, they are not merely travelling to a place. They are making a pilgrimage to a sacred place; a place that they see as part of themselves.
The true meaning of jia
In Chinese, the word for ‘family’ and ‘home’ is the same character - jia 家. The inseparability of these two concepts becomes all the clearer when looking into the spirit and ritual that surrounds the yearly pilgrimage many make back to their hometowns, whether or not they still have families living there. Even for those who have snagged the rare opportunity to leave behind gruelling farmwork and the daily toil of village life, there is still a feeling of a strong connection to their home, even if that connection leaves them with mixed feelings.
In the end, the Chinese New Year migration represents a part of Chinese culture that modernity still has not been able to eradicate: the urban-rural divide. This divide is now no longer just represented by hukous, minimum wage work, or displacement, but also by a sense of longing and nostalgia that for many can only be satisfied by performing certain rituals once a year. And to do that, one has to go home:
“For people working far from their hometowns, the best plan is to go home. I remember the streets and lanes in my hometown are busiest during the Lunar New Year. First, my family and I get up early in the morning and visit the tombs (to pay our respects to our ancestors). Then we go and greet our elders and close relatives.
I like the lively, close-knit atmosphere there, where all the people in the village know each other and warmly say “happy New Year.” I feel that the big city lacks this kind of atmosphere.” (Sixth Tone)
Sources
BBC, “Chinese New Year: Clamping down on going home for the holidays”
Meng Li, “Ritual and Social Change: Chinese Rural–Urban Migrant Workers’ Spring Festival Homecoming as Secular Pilgrimage,” Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 2014
Peng Fang, “A Study on Chinese Spring Festival Consumption of New Generation Migrant Workers,” Journal of International Trade & Commerce, 2015
People’s Daily, “Reverse Spring Festival travel rush trend continues to grow”
Sixth Tone, “Chinese Scour Megacities for Peace and Quiet as COVID-19 Curbs Travel”
Sixth Tone, “The Human Side to Another Lost Spring Festival”
Sixth Tone, “Shanghai Normally Empties for Spring Festival. But Not This Year.”
Sixth Tone, “Spring Festival Travel Is Tricky. For Many, It’s Still Worth It.”
Sixth Tone, “Capturing the Alienation of China’s Young Migrants”
Zhenxuan Yin, “Reverse traffic flows: Visualizing a new trend in Spring Festival travel rush in China,” EPA: Economy and Space, 2019