China’s biggest holiday brings a travel rush

BEIJING/ANHUI (CNN) -- Zhou Xia walks briskly and with a certain purpose.

Carrying three small bags and layered up for the Beijing night, she weaves through traffic and over crowded pedestrian walkways. These are her first steps in a thousand-kilometer trip home to Anhui province.

Zhou is elated.

"I feel great, because I am going home," she says. "I only get home once a year or sometimes maybe twice. I want to go home to see my parents and children because I miss them."

Zhou came to Beijing for the money. She works two jobs as a maid and her husband gets odd jobs as a foreman. Together they earn around $1,200 a month to support their extended family.

"I don't really like Beijing," she says. Her life here is crowded and the work is constant. But opportunities to earn in China have drained from the countryside into the cities. Like many migrants, she is drawn to the capital simply for the money.

And migrants are everywhere in Beijing's sprawl. They clean homes, run fruit stands on wheeled carts, make crispy pancakes on gas fires for the breakfast rush, clean garbage off the streets and clip hedges by hand. They help run this city of more than 20 million.

During the Lunar New Year, they post handwritten signs on their shops, receive red "Hong Bao" envelops stuffed with bonuses, and leave in their millions. Many Beijingers don't notice them until they are gone.

Zhou joins the throngs milling outside Beijing Railway Station, an imposing Maoist and Soviet-style landmark. Everywhere migrants sit on stools and buckets surrounded by their luggage, puffing on cigarettes in the cold.

"I bet you haven't experienced anything like this before," says Zhou as we jam through the bottleneck to board. We're jammed right in the middle of giant swathe of humanity.

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China's biggest holiday brings a travel rush