China starts to move again after big freeze

Rail services returned to normal in southern China today after days of delays caused by the worst snow and ice storms in decades.

Many people were so desperate to get on a train that they ditched their luggage outside the station in the city of Guangzhou, starting point for the busy rail line north to Beijing.

Although railway officials said the restored train service could carry 400,000 passengers a day, hundreds of thousands of people, most of them migrant workers, were still waiting to leave Guangzhou, formerly called Canton.

More were streaming into the city every hour to catch a train home for next week’s Chinese New Year in one of the world’s biggest annual mass movements of people. A record 178.6 million people – more than the population of Russia - were expected to ride the rails in the coming weeks.

To control the crowds, police used metal barricades to build a massive corral, as big as two or three football fields, around the train station’s plaza. Thousands of travellers were herded into the waiting area on a first-come-first-served basis. Inside the zone, they waited shoulder to shoulder, pressed tightly against one another.

“I’ve been stuck here for two days, and I stood here in the plaza all last night and couldn’t sleep,” one migrant worker in a green work suit yelled before he was swallowed up by the waiting crowd.

As soon as one wave of passengers was allowed to board trains, police allowed another to leave the plaza and enter the train station to wait some more.

Several women were overcome with emotion as they neared the station and began crying.

China’s rail system was thrown into chaos last weekend, when heavy snow in regions just north of Guangdong province began pulling down power lines.

Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, quickly swelled with migrant workers who had just taken holiday leave from the thousands of factories in the province. The nation has nearly 200 million migrant workers.

The freakish blizzards, which are forecast to continue, also caused dozens of deaths, power cuts and airport closures in southern, central and eastern China.

The storms also took a “extremely serious” toll on crops, said Chen Xiwen, deputy director of the Communist Party’s leading financial team. “The impact on fresh vegetables and on fruit in some places has been catastrophic,” he said.