China will celebrate the beginning of its new year this Friday, heralding the start of one of the planet’s great migrations. Also known as Spring Festival or Lunar New Year, all of China takes vacation at once to mark the occasion, resulting in the largest human event on earth. To mark the Year of the Dog, 385 million Chinese people are expected to leave the major cities to visit their families in rural parts of the country according to China News, marking a 12 percent increase on last year. The experience is always a difficult one for people making the trip, with airports, roads and trains overcrowded and uncomfortable. This is set to improve in the years to come with China steadily expanding its high-speed rail network. Last year was notable as the first time more people took high-speed trains than conventional ones.
Comparing Chinese New Year with America’s largest annual migration is a good way to gauge its enormous size. Thanksgiving 2017 saw jam-packed airports, snarling tailbacks on the interstate and a grand total of 50.9 million travelers. The volume of people on the move in China is over seven times bigger, though its massive population does make a difference of course. Nevertheless, the sheer scale of ”chunyun”, the annual Spring Festival migration, is simply staggering. It also easily surpasses the world’s largest pilgrimages in scale. The Arba’een Pilgrimage in Iraq involved 40 million people in 2016 while the Hajj in Mecca received two million pilgrims last year.
*Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)
