China’s fabled “chunyun” migration smashed records this year, with the Ministry of Transport reporting on 21 February that cross-regional passenger movements hit 352.999 million trips on 20 February—the highest single-day figure ever recorded. The 2026 travel window runs from 2 February to 13 March and is expected to see 9.5 billion journeys by rail, road, air and water as families reunite for the first Spring Festival unaffected by pandemic controls. Behind the headline number is a sharp rebound in long-distance rail. High-speed services on the Beijing–Guangzhou and Shanghai–Kunming corridors operated at 108 percent of designed seating capacity thanks to standing-ticket allowances and extra late-night trains. Civil-aviation regulators approved more than 2 700 additional domestic flights for the peak return dates of 20–22 February, while major airports kept immigration desks open 24 hours to prevent queuing bottlenecks for the growing cohort of overseas Chinese and foreign visitors.
![Spring-Festival Travel Rush Sets New Daily Record]()
For international travelers navigating this surge, VisaHQ provides a streamlined way to secure the correct Chinese visa or transit authorization before departure. Its online portal (https://www.visahq.com/china/) walks users through document requirements, offers expedited processing options, and supplies real-time status updates—giving both individual passengers and corporate mobility teams one less variable to worry about during peak travel windows.
For global-mobility managers the surge is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a more normalised transport environment restores confidence in temporary assignments and regional rotations timed around the holiday. On the other, ticket scarcity and price spikes forced some companies to delay project kick-offs or authorise premium-class travel. Logistics departments also battled road congestion; national express-parcel leader SF Express reported average delivery-window slippage of 14 hours during the peak. Officials highlighted two enabling factors: the broadened 55-country 240-hour transit-visa waiver, which drew a record 61 000 short-stay foreign passengers over the holiday week, and the removal of most domestic health-code checks that had complicated inter-provincial movement in previous years. The Ministry pledged to feed lessons learned into its planned 2027 Smart Transport upgrade, aiming for fully digital, ticket-less boarding across all modes.
For international travelers navigating this surge, VisaHQ provides a streamlined way to secure the correct Chinese visa or transit authorization before departure. Its online portal (https://www.visahq.com/china/) walks users through document requirements, offers expedited processing options, and supplies real-time status updates—giving both individual passengers and corporate mobility teams one less variable to worry about during peak travel windows.
For global-mobility managers the surge is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a more normalised transport environment restores confidence in temporary assignments and regional rotations timed around the holiday. On the other, ticket scarcity and price spikes forced some companies to delay project kick-offs or authorise premium-class travel. Logistics departments also battled road congestion; national express-parcel leader SF Express reported average delivery-window slippage of 14 hours during the peak. Officials highlighted two enabling factors: the broadened 55-country 240-hour transit-visa waiver, which drew a record 61 000 short-stay foreign passengers over the holiday week, and the removal of most domestic health-code checks that had complicated inter-provincial movement in previous years. The Ministry pledged to feed lessons learned into its planned 2027 Smart Transport upgrade, aiming for fully digital, ticket-less boarding across all modes.
