China’s Labor Day holiday kicked off with a nationwide travel surge on Friday as millions took to trains, highways, ferries, and flights to start their holiday journeys.
Railway authorities estimated 24.8 million passenger trips nationwide on May 1 alone, with 2,070 extra trains added to meet travel demand.
On the highways, the Ministry of Transport projected daily expressway traffic to reach 70 million vehicle trips, the highest single-day figure ever for a Labor Day holiday, with tolls waived from May 1 to May 5 for passenger vehicles carrying no more than seven seats. Notably, nearly 24 percent of the traffic is made up of new energy vehicles.
The Maritime Safety Administration reported an estimated 9.2 million passenger trips during the holiday, up 6.8 percent year on year. Routes across the Qiongzhou Strait and popular city sightseeing cruises would be particularly busy.
On Friday, the Qiongzhou Strait alone was expected to handle 120,000 passenger trips and 31,000 vehicle trips, including 20,000 trips by new energy vehicles, a 60-percent increase over last year. Maritime authorities in Hainan, Guangdong, and Guangxi have completed special safety checks on 57 ferries and four barge vessels operating during the holiday.
Civil aviation experienced its own travel peak, with passenger flows concentrated among the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao, and Chengdu-Chongqing city clusters.
Labor Day holiday sees record high travel flow in China
The United Nations said on Thursday that explosive ordnance contamination in the Palestinian Gaza Strip and the West Bank is a “daily emergency,” warning that unexploded ordnance not only endangers civilian lives but also severely hinders humanitarian aid, community recovery and reconstruction efforts.
At a press conference, Julius Van Der Walt, chief of the UN Mine Action Programme in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said the explosive ordnance contamination has worsened the already severe humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.
“So since October 2023 in Gaza, more than 1,000 people, I think the latest figure is, more than 1,200 people, or on an average of one person every single day has been killed or injured by explosive ordnance. So of all the accidents that we have been able to verify and get more information about nearly half of those victims are children,” he said.
He said current evidence shows an extremely high density of explosive ordnance contamination in Gaza. The UN Mine Action Service has identified nearly 1,000 dangerous items during missions requested by humanitarian partners alone. This is equivalent to encountering an explosive device every 600 meters, meaning that given Gaza’s small geographic size, no community, child or family can avoid the threat.
Explosive ordnance poses ‘daily emergency’ in Gaza: UN
