China legislates to maintain Spring Festival traditions

Yu Jie is one of the lucky ones. The 21-year-old waitress of a hotel in Shanghai boarded a train early Thursday on her way home hoping to arrive before Sunday, the Spring Festival, in time for a family reunion.

"It was so hard to get a train ticket. I had to divide my journey into two, from Shanghai to Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province, and then from Wuhan to Yueyang, a city in Hunan Province," said Yu, who is one of millions of people heading home to visit their parents during the Chinese Lunar New Year.

It has been a tradition in China that those living apart from their elderly family return home during the festival period.

To further encourage this, the Law of the People's Republic of China on Protection of the Rights and Interests of the Elderly was revised with a law article in December.

To become effective on July 1, 2013, the revised law stipulates that family members living apart should often visit their senior family and employers should guarantee employees' rights to vacation and opportunities to visit their senior family.

Shen Guoming, an expert with Shanghai Institute of Legislation, said the proposal encouraging people to visit their family was first initiated by the public and is included in provincial regulations and finally become an article of a national law.

However, goodwill cannot only be realized by law.

China has 250 million migrant workers and most of them have one opportunity to go home during the Spring Festival. Others may not have a chance during the whole year.

There will be more than 3.4 billion passengers trips during the festival this year, up 8.6 percent from 2012.

However, "going home" has become a national puzzle, due to Chinese companies' employment rules, railway capacity, weather and even the online ticketing system.

Despite getting her ticket, Yu said, "This year, I tried to buy a train ticket on the Internet, but got nothing. Then a colleague tried more than 100 times to call the ticketing phone number and finally bought me a ticket."

She described herself as one of the "lucky ones."