China’s massive Lunar New Year travel rush has begun early this year with hordes of migrant workers streaming out of cities where jobs have dried up because of a slowing economy, state media said yesterday.
The Lunar New Year for this year falls on Jan. 26, but the annual exodus is already under way in major cities, with many of China’s millions of migrant laborers heading home to an uncertain future, Xinhua news agency said.
The Beijing West Railway Station logged 130,000 departing passengers on Thursday, 38,000 more than the daily average, Xinhua quoted station authorities as saying.
It quoted officials who “cited the lack of big construction projects in the capital city as the reason for the increased seasonal travel,” although this year’s relatively early Lunar New Year holiday was also a factor.
Long queues also developed at railway hubs in the eastern commercial metropolis of Shanghai, with police dispatched to maintain order, it said.
State media said previously that a record 2.3 billion passenger trips were expected to be taken during the Lunar New Year period, the country’s most important holiday.
A record 188 million people will take to the nation’s rail system and another 24 million will take holiday-related flights this month and next month, the reports said, in what is the world’s biggest annual migration.
The impact of the global economic crisis was expected to boost this year’s travel rush.
The millions of workers who have migrated from poor and rural regions to the country’s cities and coastal manufacturing regions have played a vital role in China’s recent economic expansion.
But slowing overseas demand for Chinese products has already shuttered many factories and was expected to throw millions out of work.
The yearly exodus is marked by chaotic scenes as masses of Chinese desperate to return home overwhelm the nation’s transport grid.
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
Seven people sustained mostly minor injuries in an airplane fire in South Korea, authorities said yesterday, with local media suggesting the blaze might have been caused by a portable battery stored in the overhead bin. The Air Busan plane, an Airbus A321, was set to fly to Hong Kong from Gimhae International Airport in southeastern Busan, but caught fire in the rear section on Tuesday night, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. A total of 169 passengers and seven flight attendants and staff were evacuated down inflatable slides, it said. Authorities initially reported three injuries, but revised the number
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
‘BALD-FACED LIE’: The woman is accused of administering non-prescribed drugs to the one-year-old and filmed the toddler’s distress to solicit donations online A social media influencer accused of filming the torture of her baby to gain money allegedly manufactured symptoms causing the toddler to have brain surgery, a magistrate has heard. The 34-year-old Queensland woman is charged with torturing an infant and posting videos of the little girl online to build a social media following and solicit donations. A decision on her bail application in a Brisbane court was yesterday postponed after the magistrate opted to take more time before making a decision in an effort “not to be overwhelmed” by the nature of allegations “so offensive to right-thinking people.” The Sunshine Coast woman —
RSS