Reverse traffic flows: Visualizing a new trend in Spring Festival travel rush in China

Abstract Traditionally, Chinese would go back to their hometowns to reunite with their families during the Chinese Lunar New Year. In the last 30 years, due to the uneven development of regions, Spring Festival travel rush were mainly from large cities to small cities or rural areas. However, in recent years, an increasing number of migrants prefer to stay in larger cities and have their families visit them during the Spring Festival. To map the reverse migrations and explore their influence, we collected and processed data on passenger travel in 2017 and 2018 from Tencent Location Big Data and GDP in 2017 at the prefectural level. The visuals based on the data indicate that the volume of reverse migration was mainly concentrated in regional centers, with great variation across cities. Besides, with increasing reverse traffic flows, large cities are shifting from being empty to vibrant cities during the Spring Festival, while small cities and rural areas are losing their vibrancy.