Railway Tickets: No Joking Matter

So President Hu Jintao had to intervene with the Ministry of Railways to try and bring some order to the sale to tickets. It’s may strike some non-Chinese as a little odd that the president of a country of 1.3 billion people should reach down to the level of railway ticket sales. But in China just before the Spring Festival, this is a HUGE issue and one that causes enormous ill feeling, something that the government is particularly nervous about as unemployment caused by the global economic downturn saors. During what is often termed the “largest annual migration on the planet”, ie Chinese people returning home for the new year (or spring festival, a term introduced by the Communists way back when they wanted to banish vestiges of feudal thinking like the lunar calendar on which the new year is based) holiday. Tens of millions on the move or trying to move and having to wait hours, sometimes days in freezing cold temperatures (in Beijing, you have to have a ticket to get in the main station so the lines are outside). everyone including the government knows that the problem is corruption, with railway officials, ticket sellers and scalpers colluding to buy up large blocks of tickets and resell them at higher prices. It happens every year and every year it does seem as though among the country’s mountain of intractable problems, this is one that could–and should– be fixed fairly quickly and easily. As the good folk at Danwei report, the nightmare of travel at the new year has given rise to some black humor. a very pointed joke involves a businessman desperate to get to, say, Zhengzhou, the capital of famously corrupt Henan province, where local officials are a law unto themselves even by Chinese standards, dispatching squads of goons to the capital to stop embittered provincials from complaining to the local government by kidnapping them and forcibly bring them back to Henan. I have pretty much given away the punch line by now but here goes:  The frustrated man can’t get a train or plane ticket so takes a bundle of paper (this would be the documentation of his case if he really were a petitioner) down to the Central Office for Petitioners in Beijing and starts shouting about the people of Zhengzhou demanding their rights or somesuch. Within minutes he has been bundled into a van and driven to his destination, courtesy of  the Henan provincial government. Definitely black humor. In reality of course, he’d probably get a severe beating as well and possibly be slung into an insane asylum to cool off.