杨恒均博士被翻译成英文的文章集锦 - 杨恒均读书会 - 天益社区

For Chinese communities around the world, this week marks the beginning of a week-long holiday to mark Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival as it is usually called. The significance of the holiday is on the same level as Christmas for the Western world and also involves family reunions in one’s hometown. One of the phenomena associated with the Spring Festival is the massive outflow of people from the cities where they work back to their hometowns. Even in an island as small as Taiwan, every time Chinese New Year rolled around there would be massive traffic jams on the highways with hundreds of thousands of people leaving Taipei for their hometowns down south. The scale of the travel situation in China is even more mind-boggling where you have an estimated 188 million people making the journey home, and that is only for the railways.

A blog posting in China comparing the differences between how holiday travel is handled in the U.S. and China has struck a chord, receiving over 100,000 views and 1,100 comments. Popular novelist and former Atlantic Council senior fellow Yang Hengjun attributes China’s travel problems to two main factors: 1. The inability of regular citizens to change their official residence (known as hukou in Mandarin) which greatly limits the social services that migrant workers and their families can access outside of their hometown. This often ends up separating parents from their children who can only receive schooling in their hometowns. 2. Train and airplane tickets are snatched up by those with special connections to the government.

Yang writes, “Unlimited authority, abuse of power, an unfair system, monopolistic corporations, social inequality, and corruption has made the Chinese New Year travel rush not a transportation problem, but a social and political one. That is what causes so many people to get angry! … In the U.S., apart from a small minority of government officials who are traveling for business dealing with national interests, those who are traveling for personal reasons are all treated the same in the purchasing of tickets. Even if you were traveling on business for your company or the government, you need to go through the same process as an illegal immigrant worker in a Chinese restaurant: purchase tickets online or line up at the counter, first come first serve. … In China, one’s level in society basically determines whether you are able to get a ticket, and the highest level is, obviously, the ‘servants of the people.’ Have you ever heard any public servant or their family members complain about not being able to get tickets?”

外媒引用自《美国是如何解决“春运”问题的？》