As millions of Chinese make their way home from major cities for the annual Spring Festival, and train and bus tickets remain notoriously scarce, hundreds of thousands of people have resorted to travel by motorbike. An estimated 100,000 people returned home from the southern city of Guangzhou alone on motorbikes. In this cartoon from New Century magazine posted to Caing.com, drawn by Ding Huayong (丁华勇) with text by Qiu Kaijun (邱锴俊), a migrant motorbike rider with a pair of scissors cuts the cord that ties him to China’s rail system, represented by a massive grey figure labelled “China Railways” seated atop a train car, and the motorbike and the train symbolically part ways as the migrant says, “I’m done playing with you.” The head on the massive shoulders of the grey figure is proportionally tiny, presumably a criticism of how inept China’s Ministry of Railways has been in recent years in resolving the problem of insufficient supply during the annual Spring Festival rush.
