One billion absentees

“We’re officially supposed to be back at work on Valentine’s Day, the 14th. But I won’t be back until the 18th. I’ll just tell my boss that I couldn’t buy train tickets back to Beijing and take a few extra days off.”

So said a Chinese friend of mine when I asked him about his plans for the Chinese New Year. This practice, he told me was extremely common. “All my friends are planning to do the same thing.” As Spring Festival approaches, the biggest annual mobilization of people worldwide is currently taking place, as hundreds of millions of Chinese head back to their hometowns for New Year. This year, wretched weather, including the heaviest snowfalls in central and southern China for 50 years, have conspired to make New Year travel even more arduous than usual. Almost 200,000 travellers were forced to camp out in the rain outside Guangzhou station earlier this week after heavy snow brought down overhead power lines on the main Beijing-Hong Kong line. But the weather is not the real issue at stake – for New Year travellers, the chaotic nature of China’s train ticket distribution is far and away the biggest headache.

The rail authorities put on additional services, or ‘L’ trains, to accommodate the increased demand over the New Year. These, along with tickets for luxury express train services, or ‘Z’ trains, go on sale 10 days before departure. But tickets for regular express trains ‘T’ and ‘K’ trains, or for slow, stopping services, only go on sale four days before departure. Over the past fortnight, millions of workers have queued for hours outside their local ticketing outlets in freezing temperatures in a bid to buy a train ticket home. I walked past a ticket office near my flat at 10am on Saturday morning and there were already half a dozen people in the queue. Tickets don’t go on sale until 7pm. And many of those who have stood in line in sub-zero temperatures, stamping their feet in a bid to keep warm, got to the front of the queue only to discover that their train was sold out. Or that they would have to travel hard seat on their 50-hour journey home.

And even those lucky enough to have got their hands on train tickets home are not optimistic about getting hold of tickets back to Beijing, Shanghai, or whichever city their place of work is located. Once again, they have little choice but to go and queue up at their local station and hope that they are lucky a second time around. It’s little wonder that many do what my friend does, and deliberately extend their holidays by a few days. “I’ll tell my boss that if she wants to buy me a plane ticket, I’ll happily be back in the office on the 14th,” he added. No wonder most Chinese businesses essentially write February off as a dead month. Many have little idea when their employees will make it back to work.

China’s size and the sheer number of rail passengers mean that improving the ticketing infrastructure would require a major investment. Ensuring that all stations and official ticketing agents from Kashgar to Kunming, Harbin to Hong Kong, are able to communicate with each other and enabling offices to be able to sell tickets up to a month, or two months’ in advance, is a mammoth undertaking. And yet, the current chaos is costing the economy billions of RMB in lost earnings.

The Confederation of British Industry estimates that sick leave costs the British economy £1.75 billion in lost earnings every year. Given the sheer scale of expected post Spring Festival absences, I shudder to think how much Chinese firms are losing. The sooner the system is upgraded, the better for all concerned. Though I guess my friend will have to come up with a new excuse for his absence.

Matthew Plowright