China 101
Chunyun (Spring Festival travel rush)
春运
The roughly 40-day travel rush around Chinese New Year, often described as the largest annual human migration on Earth.
Chunyun, literally spring transport, is the travel season surrounding Chinese New Year. For about 40 days each year, hundreds of millions of migrant workers, students, and white-collar employees travel home and back, producing billions of individual journeys in total. It is routinely called the largest annual human migration in the world.
The migration exists because of China's economic geography: jobs cluster in coastal megacities while families and hometowns are inland. Buying a train ticket for chunyun was once a famous ordeal of queues and scalpers; today most tickets are sold through the official 12306 app and the high-speed rail network has absorbed much of the pressure.
Stories about chunyun, from packed trains to reunion dinners, surface every January or February and are a window into family structure, regional inequality, and the emotional weight Chinese New Year carries.