That’s how many trips the Chinese government estimates citizens will make for the holiday. Bloomberg points out that dwarfs Thanksgiving in the U.S., which AAA projected spurred just 46.3 million Americans to travel. More than six times that many will travel in China by train alone.
Speaking of the impressive number of Chinese citizens traveling for the holiday, larger metropolitan cities turn into ghost towns as people leave the city for the new year. For example, Beijing, which normally boasts a population of 21.5 million people, becomes largely empty. Over at Quartz, they’ve collected some of the haunting pictures taken by people who stayed in the city and are enjoying some peace and quiet.
Fireworks are a big part of the Chinese New Year celebration, but they can also be hazardous to people’s health. Chinese officials worried that this year’s mild weather may mean that pollution from fireworks would stick around as opposed to being blown away. As reported by the IBT, the city of Beijing has allowed just 942 stores to sell fireworks this year, down at least 100 stores from last year.
The approximate number of migrant workers in China, according to the Washington Post. Those workers are flooding out of China’s biggest cities to return home to their families, and search engine Baidu is charting many of their trips. “It’s not just the world’s biggest human migration,” a company spokesman told the AP. “It’s the biggest mammalian migration.”
That’s how many live lobsters will be exported from Canada to China each week at peak this year. Spurred by concerns about domestic seafood, Chinese demand for the luxury shellfish is so high that Canadian exporters are having trouble keeping up, the New York Times reported.
The increase in C-section births one doctor reported in the lead up to the new year, mostly by mothers wanting to give birth in the current year of the horse instead of the upcoming year of the goat. The International Business Times reports that uptick is reflected throughout China and elsewhere in Asia. C-sections were up 35 percent in Singapore, for example.
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