People in most parts of China won't be celebrating Spring Festival, the Chinese lunar new year holiday, under blue skies today.

The latest forecast from the China Central Meteorological Station predicts clouds, rain and sleet will likely usher in the day in south China, and snow is expected in the north.

And the temperature in Beijing, the capital city, will hover at 0 to 5 degrees Celsius, with lows dropping to -5.

Most of China was hit with an unusually cold January; the average temperature in Beijing last month was -6.7 degrees, the coldest for the month since 1977, and 2 degrees lower than normal. In Shenyang, in northeast China's Liaoning province, the mercury was four degrees lower than average.

Meteorologists in Beijing have pointed out that La Nina is the cause of the freezing weather. Warm waters from the eastern Pacific Ocean turned cold when lower-than-usual temperatures at the equator met with frequent cold currents moving south from Siberia,resulting in heavy snow in northern China and rain in the southern part of the country.

Xu Liangyan, an employee of China's National Climate Center, said that the average temperature for southwest China's Yunnan Province in the last ten days of January was three to four degrees lower than in a normal year.

And a blizzard there on January 30, the heaviest since 1983, dropped 30 centimeters of snow and pulled temperatures down below zero in the subtropical province.

Kunming, the provincial capital, is known as China's "Spring City" for its year-round mild climate and annual average temperature of 14.5 degrees Celsius. The city hosted the 1999 International Horticultural Exposition.

Residents of Nanning in south China's usually-warm Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region were startled to see snow on January 30; the local meteorological bureau received calls from many skeptical citizens asking if the snow was real.

Statistics from the meteorological bureau of Jilin, one of the coldest provinces in China, show that the province's average temperature for the first 24 days of January was 18 degrees below zero, and bitterly cold lows of -30 degrees were reported.

Snow fell on Shenyang of neighboring Liaoning Province for eight days straight at the start of January. "This is the coldest winter I have ever seen. I am just a little bit unused to it," said a shivering man surnamed Wang in his fifties, who works for the provincial government.

This year's midwinter has re-introduced many southerners in China to the kind of cold temperatures they haven't known in 13 years of warm winters. Shanghai, Zhejiang, Guangdong, and Guangxi all saw frost and snow.

Local merchants say the only thing that's hot are sales of eiderdown coats and electric heaters, especially in the south.

The cold weather still cannot keep Chinese from traveling, either back home from their working places or to some tourist attractions, to spend the seven-day holiday.

Transportation supervision departments report a total of 1.61 billion people are planning to travel in spite of the cold. Many have targeted Australia and southeast Asia as the perfect vacation destinations.

(Xinhua)