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China's big chill threatens more holiday misery
CHANGSHA, China, Jan 31 (AFP) Jan 31, 2008
Authorities in China on Thursday warned of more travel misery to come as millions of people struggled to get home for the country's most important holiday amid savage winter weather.

Across central, southern and eastern China, millions of travellers have been stranded or delayed by the worst snow storms seen here in half a century, which have killed 64 people, cut power lines and created havoc on roads and rails.

With trucks unable to deliver basic goods to some areas, the army and air force have been recruited to kickstart relief efforts while the government in Beijing has called for calm, with still more harsh weather in the forecast.

The government has even taken the rare step of asking millions of migrant workers to forego their annual trip home for next week's Lunar New Year festival -- often, the only bright spot in a life of hard toil and low pay.

"For the sake of their safety, and relieving the stress on transport, I advise migrant workers to stay in the cities where they work," Zheng Guoguang, chief of the China Meteorological Administration, told the China Daily.

"In normal weather conditions, it would take at least one week for full restoration of power supplies. Against the current backdrop, it will take far longer for electricity supplies and road and railway traffic to return to normal."

Although air, rail, and road traffic in some areas has slowly resumed, the transport system is effectively paralysed in others.

In Changsha, capital of hard-hit Hunan province, crowds mobbed airport check-in counters on Thursday.

About 100 passengers blocked access to the security screening area in frustration at the transport snarls, said Frankie Fu, a college student who has waited for a week to return to his home in Guizhou province.

"We have to protest -- otherwise we won't get home in time for the festival, because weather forecasters say there will be more snow," he told AFP.

Airport officials told AFP that up to 10,000 passengers in Changsha had been affected by flight cancellations and delays in recent days.

Elsewhere, long stretches of major highways remained impassable, with state television broadcasting images of tens of thousands of cars and cargo trucks in bumper-to-bumper standstills.

In the southern city of Guangzhou, an estimated 800,000 people reportedly remained stranded amid continued chaos on road and rail networks leading north.

Officials were quoted by state media as saying the snarls there, where millions of migrant workers live and work, would persist for at least another three to five days.

In a rare move for a Chinese leader, Premier Wen Jiabao waded into crowds of marooned passengers at Guangzhou's main train station on Wednesday to declare the government was doing all it could.

But Zhang Yongfang, the 32-year-old manager of a Guangzhou computer shop, joined many in excoriating the government for failing to anticipate the scale of the mess.

"We have to be able to deal with this properly to demonstrate that we can also deal with big events like the Olympics this year," said Zhang, who is trying to return home to adjacent Hunan province.

The government has ordered troops to join in relief efforts following mounting reports of water shortages and spiking food prices.

State television showed thousands of soldiers shovelling snow off highways and providing water to stricken residents in hard-hit areas.

Four military transport aircraft were ordered to begin ferrying quilts, coats and other supplies later Thursday to southern China for people whose homes had been destroyed.

Nearly 150,000 homes had collapsed and another 600,000 had been damaged amid total direct economic losses of 4.5 billion dollars thus far, state media said. Reports say more than 100 million people have been affected by the weather.

At least 30 million people have been affected by rolling power blackouts, with the weather strangling the distribution of coal, source of three-quarters of China's energy, the government has said.

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