MASS EXODUS
According to data from Hitwise, a division of Experian that measures website traffic, the average daily hit of 12306.cn, the official train ticket booking website, has topped 120 million since Jan. 16.
Chinese people are expected to make 3.4 billion trips during the holiday travel period, and the volume of railway passengers is estimated at 220 million, Wei Ruiming, a MOR official said Tuesday.
In extreme cases, the anxiety over tickets can drive people crazy.
After failing to get train tickets, a man surnamed Wu decided to drive his family of seven back to Shaanxi from Qinghai Province in his four-seater car last week.
Wu had five adults in the four seats and squeezed two nine-year-old boys into the trunk.
He had driven about 22 hours when traffic police officers saw a hand reach out of the trunk.
Police stopped the car and fined Wu, telling him he had to find another way to transport his family.
While the majority of migrant workers and students choose to travel by train for its cost-effectiveness, a ticket is one of the hardest commodities to get in China.
However, some people have their own ways.
Pei Jiyang, a Peking University student, is known as the "Ticket King", as he has booked more than 200,000 train tickets for his friends and other migrant workers in the past three years.
He does not charge for his services and is acclaimed as a hero.
Pei has published some of his ticket strategies on the web.
However, a couple in south China's Guangdong Province ended up in jail for helping others secure train tickets.
Zhong Quanzhen and his wife, surnamed Ye, have been detained by Guangdong police and may spend Spring Festival in jail, after they helped others buy tickets and charged 10 yuan for each one.
Police said the couple's service was unauthorized by railway authorities and they were suspected of ticket scalping.
Their neighbors and customers have protested, saying the couple did not deserve such a punishment.
"We gave them money and our identification cards, and they would buy tickets for us," said one of the couple's customers, whose family name is Yang.
Yang said she was grateful to the couple because they spared her the time and trouble of having to wait hours outside a ticket agency. "Even the ticket agency charges 5 yuan per ticket, so I think it's quite acceptable that they charge twice as much for their better service."
The couple's plight has drawn widespread attention.
"The case has been misjudged," said He Bing, vice president of the law school of China University of Political Science and Law.
"Indeed, the couple were not authorized to sell tickets because they did not have a license for such business operations," said He. "But they only bought tickets for people in need and charged a reasonable price, which is normal practice in a market economy."
He said the police should release the couple.
With the clamping down on unlicensed sales it only makes it harder for people like Wang Yougong to find a way of getting home.
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