Familiar Spring Festival travel rush returns to Shanghai railway stations Photo: Chen Xia/GT

Railway and air travels in China showed a stable recovery as the Spring Festival travel rush, or Chunyun, entered its second half, industry data showed on Thursday.

From January 22 to Wednesday, railways carried 102 million passengers, up 48.7 percent from the same period of 2022, the China State Railway Group said in a press release on Thursday. 

Trains carried 102 million passengers a day, or 90 percent of the 2019 level, the railway operator said, noting a steadily recovering trend in passenger volumes.

The 2023 Spring Festival is the first big national holiday after the nation's policy adjustment of the pandemic, with the government downgrading the management of COVID-19 from Class A to Class B starting on January 8.

More than 10 million passengers were carried daily from January 26 to Wednesday, as people began returning from their hometowns to cities where they work. 

The number of trains put into service after the Spring Festival holidays reached 9,300 per day, a 6.8 percent increase from the 2019 level.

Additional city-to-city railway services between coastal areas and provinces in central and western China were operated to transport rural workers back to their work cities to facilitate work resumption after the week-long holiday.

A similar level of recovery was seen in air travel.

According to a statement sent from aviation information provider VariFlight to the Global Times on Thursday, daily domestic flights in January averaged 10,618, up 85 percent from December and 90.73 percent of the pre-pandemic level.

Chunyun, the largest annual human migration worldwide, kicked off on January 7 and will last till February 15.

Road traffic was also robust. During the January 7-29 period, the nation's highway system served 744 million vehicles, up 14.6 percent from the 2019 level, data from the Ministry of Transport showed on Monday. 

A total of 60.29 million vehicles were registered on January 27, the last day of the Spring Festival holiday and a record high.

Global Times