From railway tracks to the open skies, a thirst for reunion fuels China's Spring Festival travel rush

BEIJING -- Every Chinese New Year's Eve, Han Ru, who captains a Beijing-Shanghai high-speed train crew, decorates her train's carriages with spring calligraphy couplets and lanterns emblazoned with the character "Fu" to symbolize good fortune. Over the years, this has become her way of expressing her New Year's greetings to her passengers.

The 2025 Spring Festival travel rush, or chunyun, began on Jan 14 and will continue through Feb 22. This year's Spring Festival holiday started on New Year's Eve, Jan 28, and ended this Tuesday, spanning eight days.

Official data shows that 96.26 million railway trips and 18.24 million air trips were made during the holiday.

This year is Han's 11th Spring Festival travel season. "Typically, the passenger flow is relatively light in the first few days of the Spring Festival holiday, but this year, almost every day has been fully booked. Take the third day of the Chinese New Year as an example -- on the high-speed train from Beijing to Shanghai, we transported over 2,000 passengers in a single trip, most of whom were families visiting relatives or traveling for leisure. On regular days, a single train on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway carries about 1,400 passengers, primarily business travelers."

Li Yitao, a flight attendant with Capital Airlines, said that he and his colleagues decorated their cabins with "Fu" characters and window stickers featuring fireworks. On the day of Spring Festival, passengers were served dumplings and given lucky sweets, and the usual music was replaced with popular festive songs such as "Come Home Often."

Liu Boqiang, another flight attendant with Capital Airlines, experienced a memorable moment on the first day of the Chinese New Year. She was on duty on a flight from Guangzhou to Beijing, which happened to coincide with a young passenger's birthday.

"Our crew surprised him with a small cake and a birthday card filled with our best wishes. We also invited him to choose a song to play in the cabin. When the child and his mother were preparing to disembark, the mother told us that this Spring Festival would be an unforgettable memory for him," she said.

Gong Zhimin, a chief flight attendant with Shandong Airlines, noted a significant increase in families traveling with children during this year's holiday. She found herself folding and storing more strollers than ever in the luggage compartments. Noting the growing number of young passengers, Gong and her crew prepared paper crafts that could be folded into small airplanes, as well as coloring books, to distribute during flights.

Yueze, an elementary school student in Beijing, returned home with his parents and older brother via high-speed rail. "This year, some of my classmates went back to their family's hometowns, and some traveled to places like Yunnan and Xinjiang," he told Xinhua, referring to two popular destinations in China.

And it wasn't just Chinese families who traveled during the holiday. An increased number of foreign visitors has also been reported.

Qiu Xuejie, a flight attendant with Shandong Airlines, attributed the rise in foreign tourists to China's expansion of its visa-free travel policy. In November last year, for example, China implemented a trial visa-free travel policy for South Korean passport holders. And recently, there has been a significant rise in South Korean passengers on Shandong Airlines flights, many of whom have shown great interest in excerpts of the Analects of Confucius that have been posted in the cabin.

"On the evening of the third day of the Chinese New Year, half of the passengers on my flight were South Korean. One of them even asked if he could get a booklet compiling all of the excerpts from the analects in the cabin, saying that he had seen it mentioned on Xiaohongshu," Qiu said, adding that she had given him her personal copy as a souvenir.

Shandong Airlines flight attendant Yang Feng encountered a South African couple traveling with their daughter and son during the holiday.

"The little girl, who was about seven or eight years old, spoke exceptionally good Chinese. We had a delightful chat, and she told me her parents both work in China. During the flight, she drew a picture for the cabin crew and wrote blessings in both Chinese and English. It's a piece we will treasure." Yang said.

Wu Kun, who was born after 1980 and is a captain with Shandong Airlines, was one of China's first female pilots hired through open recruitment. During her flight training at the Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology -- an aviation college in Tulsa, Oklahoma, founded in 1928 -- she became the first student in the college's history to achieve perfect scores in both private and commercial pilot license knowledge tests. Wu began her career as a co-pilot in 2005 and was promoted to captain seven years later.

Reflecting on her 20 years in civil aviation, Wu has lost count of how many New Year's Eve dinners she has had in the skies.

This year, however, was different. On Chinese New Year's Eve, she piloted a flight that landed in Beijing in the evening. For the first time in years, she was able to celebrate the holiday at home. She made dumplings with her son, who is now in middle school, and video-called her husband, a fellow aviation captain who was preparing to fly home from Seattle, to celebrate together.

"Being a pilot keeps me away from home, but it has also taught me the true meaning of reunion," she said.