Chunyun, or Spring Festival travel rush, is a period in which Chinese people working or studying in a far-away city return home to celebrate the Spring Festival, also known as the Lunar New Year, China’s most important holiday. Over the past three decades, more than 250 million young laborers, mostly from the country’s less developed inland provinces, have migrated to coastal cities in pursuit of better job prospects and a more prosperous urban lifestyle. The beginning of chunyun, usually in mid-January, can look like a sort of high-speed rewind of this 30-year trend, decades of migration run backwards over two weeks. Chinese travelers are expected to make 3.158 billion trips over 40 days starting in January 8, the largest periodic human migration on Earth. Many of the trips are over 30 hours long.
