China's bleak mid-winter

A cold coming
Jan 31st 2008 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition

Vicious weather disrupts one of the great annual migrations, as millions struggle to reach home for Chinese new year

AP
EVEN in the best of conditions, the period around China's lunar new year holiday poses immense logistical challenges. Tens of millions of people—students, white-collar city-dwellers and rural migrant workers—head home for family reunions. This year, sadly, conditions could hardly be worse. Severe weather in much of the country has disrupted air, road and rail transport, causing dozens of deaths and leaving millions of travellers stranded.

Worst affected are travellers in the south, especially in the city of Guangzhou, in Guangdong province, where 23m migrants work for most of the year. The massive crowd waiting for trains at Guangzhou's station, forced to make do for days in makeshift camps, was estimated by the government at more than 500,000-strong. Many more have been stuck elsewhere in Guangdong, and in Hunan and Hubei provinces, along the trunk line to northern China. By mid-week tempers had frayed and the government had started taking more aggressive crowd-control measures.

Officials have tried to show that the government is doing its best. At an emergency meeting on January 29th, the Politburo ordered “all-out efforts” to alleviate the crisis. One million police officers were stationed on the roads, and nearly half a million soldiers dispatched to assist local governments, partly by delivering food, drinking water and other supplies to areas cut off by the storms.

Unusually for a Chinese leader, Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, has visited railway stations in Changsha and Guangzhou. Megaphone in hand, he offered “profound apologies” to stranded travellers and promised that the government was doing all it could.

To prepare for this year's rush, the Ministry of Railways arranged 622 extra trains to handle some of the 178m passengers it expected during the 40-day period around the holiday on February 7th. Similar provisions were made to cater for the soaring numbers of bus and air passengers. Even China's waterways made plans to handle an expected 30m holiday passengers.

But none of these preparations was enough to cope with what officials describe as China's worst winter weather in 50 years. Harsh cold, heavy snow and freezing rain afflicted not only China's eastern and central regions, but also its south, which is usually spared winter's worst. The weather has also ravaged the electricity grid. Delayed coal shipments, the normal winter decline in hydropower capacity, and ice damage to transmission systems have all contributed to cuts in power output, just as the cold weather has driven up demand. Power cuts, in turn, have further disrupted the railways.

Another reason for power shortages is the steadily rising cost of coal, which China's power producers cannot pass on to consumers. Already concerned about the climbing inflation rates recorded over much of 2007, the government has refused to let electricity prices rise. But the winter weather is likely to add to the inflationary pressures as damaged crops and hampered distribution push up food prices. The government has already reported 32.7 billion yuan ($4.5 billion) in losses from damage to crops and homes.

According to Jun Ma, chief economist at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong, the storms' overall economic impact is likely to be short-lived, and not felt too keenly beyond hotels, airlines and other travel-related businesses. Pressure eased slightly as the weather improved toward the middle of the week, but the forecast is bad, and officials expect the difficulties to persist. They have urged people to consider giving up their home visits for this year. For many of those freezing at stations, that would add heartbreak to acute physical discomfort.