Special Report: Spring Festival Special 2009
By Qiu Lin, China Features
BEIJING, Jan. 24 (Xinhua) -- Cheng Bingchuan's nightmare began on Jan. 15 when he lined up at a booking office to buy a train ticket home. He arrived at the office near his apartment in the southern part of Beijing an hour and half before it opened.
He was third in line. He asked the two people in front of him where they were headed. To his relief, they were not taking the same train as him. "I was pretty confident of getting a ticket."
But Cheng was stunned when the office opened at 9 a.m. and he was told that all high-speed train tickets to Zibo in east China's Shandong Province, his destination, for Jan. 24 were sold out.
"It was just a few minutes after the tickets became available. How could they all be gone in the blink of an eye?", Cheng wonders.
Normally, tickets become available four days before departure for regular trains and 10 days for high-speed trains. During the Spring Festival peak, train tickets fall short of the high demand of those returning home for the most important family holiday in China.
"How could tickets have been sold out that soon?" Cheng asks. "It was just a few minutes after the tickets became available, how could they all be gone in a blink of the eye?"
In the run-up to every Spring Festival, buying train tickets becomes extremely difficult. Travelers wait for hours, even days, in freezing temperatures to buy tickets. Once aboard the overcrowded carriages, they may have to sit in aisles. Others are forced to stand for a day or longer.
This year, the Lunar New Year falls on Jan. 26. The Ministry of Railways estimates that around 188 million passengers will travel this year by train during the 40-day peak period. The number of travelers will be an 8 percent higher than that of 2008, when 13,73 millions used the train to go back home. The Ministry is also expecting daily rail traffic to grow by 340,000 people to a record average high of 4.7 million.
Homebound college students, migrant workers whose jobs have gone in the global economic crisis and those visiting family converged this year to inundate the insufficient railway system, said Wang Yongping, Railway Ministry spokesman.
China's rail system has failed to keep pace with the nation's runaway economic growth, even as it introduces sleek high-speed bullet trains and plans new lines along heavily traveled urban corridors.
The Rail Ministry reinforces that idea with a well-known statistic: the per-capita railway mileage is only 6 cm - shorter than a cigarette. China's railways can only cater for 3 million travelers and many lines must serve both passenger and freight transport.
The ministry says the average number of passengers in the first10 days of the festival rush reached 4.78 million, 714,000 more than last year.
Although the ministry has added 6,274 temporary trains and has replaced sleepers in those trains with seats to accommodate more passengers, tickets still fall short of demand.
However, the trains' capacity is not the only issue that has raised concern. The discontent of the public turned into indignation after a video featuring Beijing Railway Station was broadcasted online.
The images showed an employee behind a closed ticket office counter printing a large number of tickets and organizing them in different stacks while ignoring a long queue of desperate travelers.
"That's probably why I couldn't get a ticket even though I was one of the first in line," spats Cheng. "She was probably saving those tickets for the scalpers."
The government has received increasing complaints about the ticket system and especially the alleged collaboration between ticket sellers and scalpers.
The Ministry of Railway has released a message from President Hu Jintao on Thursday. "This year's Spring Festival is facing a tougher supply-demand imbalance. The ministry has to brainstorm for measures to improve passenger convenience and make them all public", said the President.
He also ordered the ministry to ensure a "smooth and safe" transportation during the peak travel season.
China plans to expand its rail system from the current 79,000 km to 110,000 kilometers by 2012. With this measure, the ministry hopes to meet Lunar New Year.
But Cheng Bingchuan couldn't wait until then and he was willing to pay a little extra to get his ticket sooner, so he went to an agent at a hotel. The agent charged a 30-yuan for one ticket, six times more expensive than the regular 5-yuan ticket sold by booking offices.
As the holiday approached, the agency admitted that it could not guarantee a ticket, so Cheng decided to resort to the notorious scalpers.
He searched online for contacts, but they seemed to play hard to get. "I called several scalpers and they were very impatient. They told me to call on the day when I wanted to leave, not so far in advance."
But Cheng suspected that was the scalper's way of making sure he could ask increasingly anxious travelers to pay higher prices in the last minute.
Just when he was getting desperate, a friend gave him another scalper's phone number. His friend had bought a ticket home for 200 yuan (nearly 30 U.S. dollars) more than the legal ticket price.
"He told me he could get tickets from some director at the railway station." Cheng paid 300 yuan more for his ticket, almost two times the original price. Cheng, an engineer in a technology company is glad that his salary of about 8,000 yuan a month can cover the scalper's exorbitant fee. But others might not be so lucky.
According to an online survey conducted by China Central Television (CCTV), 47.3 percent of the 28,545 respondents buy train tickets through connections, 37 percent through scalpers andonly 15.4 percent succeed in obtaining a ticket at a booking office.
Most scalpers hoard train tickets by queuing repeatedly or making bookings at different authorized ticket offices across a city, explained the official from the ministry's Public Security Bureau Zhang Qinghe.
But the official explanation has failed to satisfy passengers, and even seems to have inflamed resentment against the train ticketing monopoly of the railway department.
Some netizens have even accused railway officials of saving tickets for government departments and colluding with scalpers.
The vice-mayor of Siping (Jilin Province, northeast China), Li Ou, wrote on his blog that the public security authorities would arrest more scalpers inside the ticket offices at railway stations than outside. "Arresting scalpers is treating the symptoms, but not curing the disease. Only when you get inside the railway departments, can you get to the cause", explained Li.
Deputy Railways Minister Wang Zhiguo says 30,000 police officers are keeping order at railway stations. So far, they have detained 2,390 scalpers and confiscated 78,200 tickets.
Wang says ticket vendors are not allowed to carry mobile phones to their windows to prevent them from colluding with scalpers.
Many have suggested that a real-name registration system for ticket sales as a possible solution to the problem.
A total of 77 percent of 80,000 people polled in a survey conducted by the portal Sina.com on Monday voted for the implementation of that kind of measure, but the official from the ministry's Public Security Bureau Zhang Qinghe has already said that system would not solve the problem of insufficient capacity.
"It is understood that the capacity lags behind demand, but ordinary people want to know how these insufficient resources can be distributed fairly and transparently," says Wang Xixin, a law professor at Peking University. A real-name ticketing system should be discussed publicly, instead of being rejected as "unfeasible", Wang says.
As the Spring Festival approaches, Cheng Bingchuan is ready to go home. Waiting to board the train at the Beijing South Railway Station, Cheng fiddles with his train ticket. "The thing is, I feel very grateful to the scalper. How ironic is this?" he says.
