The Lunar New Year celebration in China traditionally spurs the largest migration in human history. Chinese traditionally take to public and private transportation to leave the cities where they work and return home to be with family. The BBC, quoting numbers from Chinese state-run media, reported that in 2019 2.46 billion people traveled by car, 390 million by rail and 65 million by air.
This year, Lunar New Year’s Day is February 12th, but the Chunyun travel period encompasses the period of time from January 28th through at least March 8th.
With that Lunar New Year celebration comes a grinding to a halt of factories, closures of China’s customs agency and a bevy of blanked sailings owing to a falling off of exports.
At least, that’s how it went until the pandemic last year. Companies remember the cascading series of factories unable to open because of travel restrictions, dozens of additional blanked sailings in the weeks and months as portions of China slowly reopened and the reliance on freighter aircraft and passenger-aircraft-turned-freighter (called ‘phreighters’) to ship PPE worldwide as other regions came to grips with the spreading effect of COVID and needed to protect front line workers and their citizens.
Inconceivable as it may be, here we are, one year removed and are asking what we can expect from this year’s Lunar New Year closures.
What we’re hearing from within China, though, is that the mass shutdown and migration might not happen for two distinct reasons.
First, there is a tremendous backlog of orders created by the supply chain bubbles of out of position containers and container ships.
“We’re hearing from our sources within China that across all industries in Shenzhen, factories are remaining open and in many cases, paying premiums to workers to remain and work,” reports Vincent Iacopella, Executive Vice President of Growth and Strategy.
To date, whether or not Chinese customs officials will be working to process those goods for export is unknown, Iacopella continues.
“We are proceeding with our customers to continue booking, reserving and securing equipment and space under the assumption that factories will need to ship because of limited space for storing finished goods.”
