Chunyun through time a living scroll of progress

For more than a decade, I have wandered through the beating heart of China's Spring Festival travel rush — chunyun. Every winter, I move across railway stations, airports, service areas and toll booths along major freeways, witnessing millions of people trying to get home. To a foreign observer, it might look like chaos; to me, a reporter embedded in its rhythm, it feels like flipping through a living, breathing scroll of Chinese life — each platform, each corridor, a page in a long, unfolding folk painting.

The scenes rarely change. Crowded halls. Long lines. Travelers carrying oversized bags and unspoken expectations. I listen to their frustrations and nostalgia, write about infrastructure upgrades and the efforts of staff working long hours to keep the system running.

After years on the transportation beat, it all began to feel routine — an annual assignment that repeated itself, year after year.

At times, I caught myself wondering: If I continue doing this job — one I genuinely love — will I spend the next two decades tracing the same routes every winter, telling versions of the same story?

Last year, however, something changed — not in the scale of the crowds or the size of the stations, but in how I understood what I was seeing.

Instead of simply collecting quotes about the present — the crowded platforms and the familiar anxiety of getting home — I found myself tracing the arc of change over decades, including changes I had personally lived through, but no longer consciously remembered.

I spoke with three generations who had experienced chunyun in entirely different ways. One interviewee, Zhang Kunming, now in his 70s, recalled spending three days on a creaking, slow train in the 1970s. Half a century later, he still remembered the smell onboard. His family never knew for sure whether he would make it home for the holiday. Letters took weeks to arrive. "If I managed to get a ticket," he told me, "I could beat the letter and be home earlier."Buying a train ticket felt like winning a lottery — a sentiment that now felt like a living link in the long arc of chunyun's transformation.

Another interviewee, Wang Youni, a veteran station manager with nearly 30 years of Spring Festival duty behind her, described scenes that now feel distant: vendors pushing carts along platforms, passengers sleeping overnight in waiting halls, ticket scalpers, theft, and even children getting lost. Today's stations, she said, remain crowded, but they are far more regulated — lined with shops, equipped with rest areas and charging points, and governed by layers of order once unimaginable.

Then there was a college student studying in Beijing and returning home to a city along the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed rail line. For her, chunyun was simply "more crowded than usual". She had never worried about securing a ticket or enduring days on a train.

Listening to them felt less like doing interviews, and more like flipping through different pages of the same long scroll.

Hearing their stories brought to mind my own experiences. As a student in the early 2000s, Spring Festival travel meant scarcity and uncertainty. The fastest train from Beijing to my hometown, Chongqing, took 24 hours. Sleeper tickets were rare. Most years, I rode upright with friends, waiting to see if my parents might show "mercy" and buy me a plane ticket for my return journey.

However, not all changes have been purely positive. Wang remembered that passengers who spent the night at stations sometimes became friends, sharing stories and company through the night. Zhang said his "neighbors" on the three-day journey would share snacks with him. Today, such scenes are seldom seen. Human connections have thinned, rules have multiplied — but perhaps that is the price of progress.

A railway historian I interviewed, Ji Jialun, reminded me that such contrasts were once at the heart of fierce debate. In the early 2000s, critics questioned whether China should invest heavily in high-speed rail, arguing it would be too costly and serve too few. "Time," Ji said, "has delivered its verdict."

Over the years, the change I have witnessed — faster trains, larger stations, smoother operations — has come from China's governance, investments in infrastructure, modernization and improving efficiency. China now operates up to 14,000 train services a day. Capacity, once the defining constraint of chunyun, has largely been addressed. What remains unchanged is the desire that drives it.

Amid the vast and impersonal infrastructure, the millions of workers on duty, and the precise choreography of modern transport, the purpose is singular: Getting people home. Understanding that — beyond my own memories and beyond the stories of those I interviewed — is what finally allowed me to see chunyun not as repetition, but as a living record of how a country, and its people, have moved forward together. In every station, on every high-speed train and along every crowded platform, the human longing for reunion continues to flow — quietly, insistently, like brushstrokes across an unending scroll of life.

Contact the writer at luowangshu@chinadaily.com.cn