The world’s biggest mass migration has hitched a ride on the sharing economy, with hundreds of thousands of Chinese turning to carpooling for their annual pilgrimage home for the lunar new year.
The holiday season, which kicks off on Monday, will see mass criss-crossing across the country and bottlenecks at stations and on the roads, as tens of millions of migrants return back home from the cities for a fortnight of family.
Yan Chao, a 25-year-old mobile app developer, is one of the 300,000 travellers in the last week of January who opted to forgo these hardships and instead hitch a lift using one of the new and increasingly popular on-demand carpooling services.