Workers enjoy more benefits on the road

Tang Zihan and his parents chose not to ride a motorbike back to their hometown in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region before the Chinese Lunar New Year as the family decided to spend the Spring Festival holiday this time around in Foshan, Guangdong province.

"Going home by motorbike, sitting between my father and mother during the Spring Festival travel rush, seems increasingly like a distant memory — it was really long, and left us very tired," said Tang.

In the past few years, the 12-year-old boy usually returned home for family reunions from Foshan several days before Spring Festival, enduring a motorbike ride of some 550 kilometers.

Tang's parents bought an apartment in 2023 in Foshan, where his father works for a local furniture factory, after years of hard work.

"My grandparents and uncle will also join us to spend the holiday in the new apartment," said Tang.

Like Tang's family, fewer migrant workers are choosing motorbike rides to return home from Guangdong during the Spring Festival travel rush. Instead, they are more likely to choose to stay in Guangdong, or take high-speed trains and other transportation options back.

Statistics from China Petrochemical Corp (Sinopec) indicated that the number of migrant workers returning home by motorbikes from Guangdong during the Spring Festival travel rush once reached nearly 700,000 at peak times.

With the development of infrastructure such as road networks and high-speed railways, and the continuous improvement of people's living standards, the number of such motorbike riders has reduced to 30,000, the statistics showed.

Sinopec launched on Friday a heartwarming campaign to assist motorbike and truck drivers during their homebound journeys, providing free services such as refueling without charge, emergency medical treatment and vehicle maintenance.

From Friday, which marked the beginning of the annual Spring Festival travel rush — all the way to March 5 — Sinopec will prepare rest stops at its nearly 100 gas stations across the provinces of Guangdong, Guizhou, Hunan, Jiangxi, Hubei, Yunnan and Henan as well as Guangxi to provide free services.

At the same time, Sinopec will provide refueling gift packages to migrant workers engaged in cross-provincial truck transport at its many Drivers' Home facilities catering to travelers returning home.

On Friday, at a Driver's Home in Shunde, Guangdong, Tan Weihe, 40, was cooking a meal with his wife. "We usually spend an hour and a half, taking free baths, doing some laundry and having lunch here," said Tan, who was driving a truck loaded with home appliances from Foshan to Guangxi.