The Wall Street Journal-20080201-Politics - Economics- In China- Stranded for the Holiday- Storms Affect Millions- Force Some to Skip Only Trip Home This Year
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Politics & Economics: In China, Stranded for the Holiday; Storms Affect Millions, Force Some to Skip Only Trip Home This Year
Full Text (1004 words)Beijing -- For Cui Yanfang, who is stranded in Beijing by China's worst storms in decades, a 20-hour trip home like the one she endured last year would be eagerly welcomed today.
Like tens of millions of other migrant workers in China, Ms. Cui gets one chance a year to go home and see her loved ones -- the Lunar New Year holiday that formally starts next week. The 32-year-old, who earns about $280 a month working for a book distributor, waits all year for the roughly 600-mile train ride to her native Anhui province to see her 8-year-old son, Haoran, and 4-year-old daughter, Yue, who live with their grandparents.
Now, she and many like her have been forced to abandon their plans and wait another year to see their families. Beginning in early January, a series of freak storms -- the worst in 50 years -- blanketed huge swaths of China in snow and ice, depriving many cities of power, closing airports and disrupting rail lines and highways. More than 100 million people, according to an official estimate, have been affected during what is China's most important holiday of the year.
Cold weather has caused "dozens of deaths," according to the state- run Xinhua news agency. It has also killed some 874,000 pigs and 14.4 million poultry, and dealt an "extremely serious" blow to winter crops, senior officials said yesterday.
While experts expect the transportation and food problems to get sorted out in coming weeks, many migrants like Ms. Cui will have to wait a full year before seeing their families again. Train stations across the country were filled with tens or even hundreds of thousands of stranded passengers this week. In Guangzhou -- the center of China's southern manufacturing center -- an estimated 800,000 people were stuck in the city.
By the time some train service resumed Wednesday, many people had been forced to cancel their plans or had given up traveling home at the government's urging. About 470,000 people issued tickets by the Guangzhou rail company had turned in their unused tickets for refunds. Tens of thousands of others continued to huddle under massive white tents set up as temporary shelters near the train station.
In the best of times, the annual homecoming of migrant workers is crowded and chaotic -- the biggest annual human migration in the world. Although the Lunar New Year is thousands of years old, the mass travel dates to just three decades ago, to the start of economic change in China. That enabled rural masses to leave their farms for better-paying jobs in big cities and coastal factories. Railway officials were expecting a record 178.6 million people to ride the trains during the holiday this year. Few migrant workers can afford to fly, which costs as much as 10 times the price of the train.
Most Chinese consider the traditional family meals on New Year's day -- Feb. 7 this year -- and the night before to be a vital start to the coming year. This year, even travelers whose routes weren't affected by weather had to line up for days just to get tickets.
The holiday officially lasts a week (Feb. 6 to 12 this year), but many migrants take a longer vacation because their chances to get home are so rare. Ms. Cui moved to Beijing in 1996 from Anhui, one of China's poorest provinces, to find a better-paying job. All year, she looks forward to the salted pork and fish of her native town. Even more, she awaits a precious 20 days of reading stories and catching up on the goings on at school with Haoran and Yue. Now she doesn't expect to see her children again until 2009.
Ms. Cui's husband, who lives with her in Beijing, had finished his work and left for home weeks ago, planning to meet her in Anhui. Soon after he left, however, he called to tell her it was snowing heavily there and warned her that getting a ticket might be a problem. Ms. Cui went to the train station on Jan. 20, and was told none were available.
After repeated tries, she gave up. "There are even fewer trains than usual, and so many people who are trying to get on those trains," she says. And if she did manage to get a ticket to the provincial capital, she would likely be stuck there because buses aren't passing the icy mountain roads to her home.
Haoran and Yue call their mother every day to ask her when she'll be going home to see them, but Ms. Cui hasn't had the heart to tell them yet that she won't make it. "I miss them so much -- so it's heartbreaking to hear them say that," says Ms. Cui.
Chinese officials have been trying to soothe those affected by the calamity. Some 460,000 soldiers have been dispatched to places hit by the storms, many of them in warmer climates that have no equipment to deal with such snows. The government has told people to cash in their tickets and has set up shelters, ordered factories to feed them and even provided free movies.
Some lucky travelers have managed to get home. Xu Yiting, a 43-year- old construction worker also from Anhui, searched for weeks before he finally got a ticket through a friend of a friend and left yesterday. "I was so worried about the ticket," he said, delighted, as he settled in his seat for the 20-hour trip.
Not as lucky, Ms. Cui spent part of yesterday shopping for presents for her children that she hopes will make it through by mail before too long. "I normally bring some clothes home for them and for my mother- and father-in-law," she says. She smiles, recalling her son's picky dressing habits. "He called me especially to remind me that he will only wear clothes with his favorite cartoon character on it," she says.
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James T. Areddy in Shanghai and Kersten Zhang in Beijing contributed to this article.
