"More than half of the passengers will travel to visit their families, while about 24 percent will be migrant workers returning home and about 10 percent will travel for tourism and business," Xu said.

This year's travel rush will be the first since China recently optimized its epidemic control management.

China's Spring Festival travel rush has been the world's biggest annual human migration for decades. In 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 3 billion trips were made during the 40-day period.

Since 2020, people have been encouraged to avoid traveling during the festival to prevent infection and transmission.

During the festival in 2022, 1.05 billion trips were made, compared with 870 million in 2021, and 1.5 billion in 2020.