# society

China’s New Year Rewired: Urbanization, ‘Reverse Spring Festival’ and the Globalization of Holidaying

China’s Lunar New Year travel has changed shape: highways were unexpectedly quiet before the holiday and surged after, even as Chinese tourists packed domestic attractions and flew abroad. The shift mirrors a deeper social transformation driven by a 67.89% urbanisation rate — over 950 million urban residents — which is weakening the automatic expectation of returning to ancestral villages and enabling reverse migration, longer outbound trips, and more discretionary uses of holiday time.