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Caller from Shanghai (where the above video was shot) to William (Wei Lian)’s Listener Hotline (Chinese audio) call-in show, broadcast today by RFA’s Mandarin service:Hi there, I’m calling from Shanghai. Our local Shanghai People’s Radio Station has a program called “Citizens and Society” which I listen to regularly. This week they were reporting on the many migrant workers who are trying to get home for the Lunar New Year, and how hard it is to get hold of train tickets. The presenter invited a couple of guests and a couple of listeners to discuss the problem. One of the guests said they had got up at 3 a.m. to buy tickets and stand in a very long queue. Some other listeners called up to talk about very similar problems. But there was one thing that they all missed out.
I don’t know if they were covering it up or if they didn’t know about it, but I have seen it with my own eyes. In the past 10 days, around 20 people have been queuing up from about 8 p.m. every evening. Every single day this has happened. There is a railway ticket office just around the corner from our home, and I heard on this program that there are between 100 and 200 offices like this all over Shanghai. One evening I was walking past and it was getting pretty late. I guess it must have been about 11 p.m. That night it was freezing cold. It was one degree Celsius below freezing. In the south that is equivalent to about minus 20 degrees Celsius because the air is so damp here. These people were already swaddled up in padded jackets, scarves and hats, and they were still shivering. I went over to them and they asked me what I wanted, whether I was there to buy a train ticket. I said I wasn’t, but that I had come over because I was so moved at the sight of them standing there so cold. As we were talking I learned that the person at the head of the queue had been queuing there since noon that day. They were saying that some of them had gone to the railway station to buy tickets, queued all day, got to the head of the queue to be told there were no tickets, and then rejoined the queue at the back and waited to get to the front again. It took them three days of queuing to get a ticket…They said that when the ticket office opened in the morning sometimes they were only able to sell tickets to the first five people in the queue, or sometimes the first 10 people in the queue. The ones waiting behind wouldn’t get tickets. Some of them knew that the chances of getting tickets the following morning were very slim and yet still they waited. Some of them had brought along little stools; others reclining chairs…I really felt very sorry for them.
…they also talked about [the problem of most of the tickets disappearing out of the back door before they even got to the ticket office].
“I have been here for two days now. More and more people are arriving. It is getting really squalid around here but I daren’t leave. I am afraid I’ll miss my chance to get on a train.”
“I am definitely not planning to travel home for Lunar New Year in future,” another stranded passenger said. He estimated that hundreds of thousands of people were milling around the station area in Guangzhou.
The Mekong River is the longest river in Southeast Asia and supports the lives of 70 million people from Tibet to Vietnam. Our reporters undertook the journey to tell their stories. From these conversations, the team produced the "Mekong diaries," a series of videos on display on www.rfa.org.
RFA News in English
China: Train ticket mayhem at Lunar New Year
Caller from Shanghai (where the above video was shot) to William (Wei Lian)’s Listener Hotline (Chinese audio) call-in show, broadcast today by RFA’s Mandarin service:Hi there, I’m calling from Shanghai. Our local Shanghai People’s Radio Station has a program called “Citizens and Society” which I listen to regularly. This week they were reporting on the many migrant workers who are trying to get home for the Lunar New Year, and how hard it is to get hold of train tickets. The presenter invited a couple of guests and a couple of listeners to discuss the problem. One of the guests said they had got up at 3 a.m. to buy tickets and stand in a very long queue. Some other listeners called up to talk about very similar problems. But there was one thing that they all missed out.
I don’t know if they were covering it up or if they didn’t know about it, but I have seen it with my own eyes. In the past 10 days, around 20 people have been queuing up from about 8 p.m. every evening. Every single day this has happened. There is a railway ticket office just around the corner from our home, and I heard on this program that there are between 100 and 200 offices like this all over Shanghai. One evening I was walking past and it was getting pretty late. I guess it must have been about 11 p.m. That night it was freezing cold. It was one degree Celsius below freezing. In the south that is equivalent to about minus 20 degrees Celsius because the air is so damp here. These people were already swaddled up in padded jackets, scarves and hats, and they were still shivering. I went over to them and they asked me what I wanted, whether I was there to buy a train ticket. I said I wasn’t, but that I had come over because I was so moved at the sight of them standing there so cold. As we were talking I learned that the person at the head of the queue had been queuing there since noon that day. They were saying that some of them had gone to the railway station to buy tickets, queued all day, got to the head of the queue to be told there were no tickets, and then rejoined the queue at the back and waited to get to the front again. It took them three days of queuing to get a ticket…They said that when the ticket office opened in the morning sometimes they were only able to sell tickets to the first five people in the queue, or sometimes the first 10 people in the queue. The ones waiting behind wouldn’t get tickets. Some of them knew that the chances of getting tickets the following morning were very slim and yet still they waited. Some of them had brought along little stools; others reclining chairs…I really felt very sorry for them.
…they also talked about [the problem of most of the tickets disappearing out of the back door before they even got to the ticket office].
RFA Cantonese service have a slideshow of photos from the Guangzhou Railway Station mass enforced sleepover
A woman surnamed Qi stranded outside the Guangzhou railway station told RFA’s Mandarin service (Chinese):
“I have been here for two days now. More and more people are arriving. It is getting really squalid around here but I daren’t leave. I am afraid I’ll miss my chance to get on a train.”
“I am definitely not planning to travel home for Lunar New Year in future,” another stranded passenger said. He estimated that hundreds of thousands of people were milling around the station area in Guangzhou.
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Filed under: China | Tagged: china_graft, china_media, china_railways, china_snowstorms, china_transport, china_unrest, chinese_new_year, commentary, East Asia, east_asia, freespeech, governance, lunar_new_year, media, Newsdesk, shanghai, year_of_the_rat |