Lunar New Year dilemma for China’s post ‘zero-COVID’ travellers
Chen Ling could barely contain her excitement as the bullet train from Beijing rolled into Zhengzhou East railway station in central China’s Henan province.
It was an afternoon, just a few days before the beginning of this week’s Lunar New Year festivities, and the train was crowded but Chen Ling could not have cared less.
The 29-year-old was happy to be one of the many millions of people travelling across China to visit family for one of the most celebrated festivals in China’s calendar.
Chen Ling had not visited her parents and hometown located outside Zhengzhou since 2019 – before China’s draconian “zero-COVID” policy had prevented people from travelling.
“I was only thinking about seeing my family again,” she told Al Jazeera in an interview via the Chinese social media platform WeChat.
“I couldn’t keep back my tears when I saw them,” Chen Ling said. “Neither could my mom when I hugged her for the first time in over three years,” she said, recounting how she hurried off the train and beat a path across the teeming station to find her parents waiting outside the main entrance.
With the recent and rapid dismantling of the deeply-unpopular zero-COVID policy, families across China are reuniting for the first time in years to celebrate the Lunar New Year holidays.
Many, such as Chen Ling, are ecstatic. She said that if she had been told just a few months ago she would be reunited with her family for the holiday, she would not have believed it.
But many are also afraid that Lunar New Year holiday travel – described as the world’s largest annual migration of humans – will result in vulnerable family members being exposed to the spread of COVID-19 in remote hometowns.
After three Lunar New Year holidays – from 2020 to 2022 – when travel restrictions, as well as quarantine and testing requirements, kept so many Chinese families apart, some are grappling with a difficult decision: Should they continue to keep their distance from vulnerable loved ones during this year’s holiday?
