The 2023 Spring Festival will face the most severe and complex weather after 2008, and 2008 is a deep memory for many people: the frost disaster at the beginning of the year, the 512 Wenchuan Da**, the Beijing Olympics, etc., each of which is enough to go down in history.
The freezing weather in many places in the south has led to the interruption of railways and highways, the power lines have been crushed by thick ice, and more than 20 provinces have been covered by heavy snow. In some southern cities, water pipes cannot withstand the freezing and are bursting, resulting in a shortage of water supply.
The worst thing is that the snow disaster that swept half of China happened to happen just before the Spring Festival, which coincided with the busiest time for the Spring Festival. At that time, hundreds of thousands of people were trapped in Guangzhou, Chenzhou and many major railway stations because the railway power equipment was destroyed by the snowstorm, and some people were trapped in the train station for more than a week.
State leaders personally went to the front line to provide guidance on disaster relief and reassure the masses, troops and local professionals rushed to repair railways, roads, electricity and water power facilities, trapped people spontaneously organized mutual aid, and the surrounding masses volunteered to provide food and medical assistance, and so on.
Even so, the frost disaster still caused 129 deaths, 4 missing people, and affected more than 100 million people, and became a painful memory for many people, especially those who returned to their hometowns for work.
In the final analysis, the occurrence of this disaster is God's bad temper, but it can cause so many difficulties, and it is also related to the social model and economic construction of our country at that time.
Now, 16 years later, even though there may be ice and snow of the same level as in 2008 during this year's Spring Festival, the consequences will be far less than that year, because times have changed.
At that time, Hubei, Hunan, Guangxi, Sichuan, Guizhou, and other central and western provinces had a large number of laborers working in Guangdong, and these places happened to be the most severely affected areas by the frost disaster. What's worse is that due to the economic crisis, the scale of the return to the hometown was much larger than in previous years.
At that time, most of these people returned to their hometowns by train, and the train from Guangzhou to Chengdu, Chongqing and other places took more than 20 hours. In addition, it is to charter a car and ride a motorcycle, and the scene of the return of the Guangdong motorcycle army to Guangxi and Guizhou is spectacular.
But now, because of the development of cities in the central and western regions, many people are no longer willing to go south to work. For example, Sichuan, as a major labor export province, labor transfer from outside the province accounted for about 55% of the total transfer from 2008 to 11, but only 43% in 2023, and the rest of the migrant workers chose to work in the province.
Including the two lakes in Guizhou, the data is similar, so since a few years ago, the motorcycle army that used to become a fixed news every Spring Festival is now difficult to see.
Some of my relatives and friends have been working in Guangdong, Zhejiang and other places for more than ten years, and have returned to their hometowns in the past ten years, and their next generation is also working in provincial capitals.
In their words, even if the salary is lower, being close to home is better than anything else. If this was the distribution of employment at the time of the 2008 disaster, the backlog of passengers at Guangzhou Railway Station would have been at least 80 percent less.
In addition to choosing to work close to home and no longer travel long distances, there is also the construction of high-speed rail lines has reached 40,000 kilometers, and the green car can only go home for dozens of hours, but now the high-speed rail can do it back and forth on the same day, which greatly reduces the urgency of returning to the hometown.
Most of the accidents in the 2008 frost disaster occurred to people returning to their hometowns, and now the significance and scale of the phenomenon of returning to their hometowns have been greatly weakened, and even if there is another frost disaster, the area of people affected will be greatly reduced compared with 2008.
Everyone works a few hours away from home, so why bother to suffer that sin again?
Back to the infrastructure technology itself, 2008 is also the year when China's high-speed rail network officially appeared on the historical stage, and China's first high-speed railway, the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway, was put into operation on August 30 of that year. Since then, the construction of the high-speed rail network has learned the lessons of freezing disasters, and has made great improvements in de-icing and snow removal and power equipment protection, so that even if there is large-scale snowfall, it can resume operation in a relatively short time.
This is a world away from 2008, when lines were interrupted for dozens of hours.
In addition, after 2008, the State Grid invested nearly 300 billion yuan to update the power grid in a number of disaster-stricken areas, snow and frost resistance, even in the alpine areas of the new power construction has withstood the test, no longer afraid of the 2008 terrible power outage scene.
2008 is of great significance to contemporary Chinese history, many changes began in that year, at least the disaster brought to the Chinese, in addition to suffering is more about thinking changes, so that our future young people, the next generation will no longer suffer such hardship, even if there are many unsatisfactory, we can go home for the New Year with peace of mind, not to ask everyone to be rich, but to ask everyone to live a stable life, this is the meaning of national development.
Remember the Spring Festival Blizzard in '08