China on the move for New Year

For many, New Year is the only chance to see family

By the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Beijing

The planet's biggest annual movement of people is underway as tens of millions of Chinese head home for the Chinese New Year holiday.

The migration will include 130-million journeys by train and 25-million by boat - and it is a migration that is getting bigger every year.

China is gearing up for the Year of the Horse

For the tens of millions of former peasants who have left China's countryside to work in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai this is the year's one and only chance to see home and family.

But many migrants are unable to go home because they have been cheated of their pay.

At Beijing's giant west railway station on Monday, the waiting room is thronged with travellers - their possessions stacked in huge bundles of canvas bags.

Workers' experiences

As their train is called, the passengers surge onto the platform - desperate to secure a spot in the massively overcrowded carriages.

People born in Year of the Horse:

Cheerful

Well-liked

Good with money

Impatient

Make good scientists and poets

It is not difficult to find someone with a story of woe.

"The employers are terrible," one man told me. "I have a friend who was owed months of wages but when he went to get it last week the boss refused to give it to him.

"There was nothing he could do."

In a case reported in the newspapers last week seven workers were beaten unconscious by the henchmen of their employer when they demanded to be paid.

China's migrants are the backbone of much of its urban economy doing the dirty and dangerous jobs most urbanites refuse. Few have any contract and many do not even have the legal right to live in China's cities.