Who'd be a traveller in China?

Well, it seems I would.  

Or will be, anyway. It's not exactly of my own volition; but ties of amity dictate.

I'm going to be heading out of Beijing at least twice, maybe thrice, in the next few weeks.

Darn, it's getting difficult to do, though.

Beijing has recently - alone amongst China's cities, it would seem - made it impossible for foreigners to purchase train tickets from neighbourhood agencies (it never has been possible to book them online, and probably won't be for a good long while yet; but the numerous kiosk arrangements dotted across the city made buying rail tickets a relatively painless process in the past). Having to go to a railway station to buy one, where there are almost always insane queues, is just a little bit too much mafan - even if the savings over a flight are substantial (and they're often not that significant these days).

So, I think I'm going to have to fly.

And I discover that China's airports are gamely maintaining their long-time dismal record for poor punctuality: just yesterday, it was announced that around 25% of internal flights last year were officially 'delayed'. It's the same every year (well, in 2007, Beijing Capital Airport managed less than 33% on time departures, making it a close second to the chaotic Brasilia airport in Forbes' 'World's Worst' ranking). Extreme weather is usually cited as the main culprit.  Extreme pollution is more like it.  Well, that, and the fact that ALL of China's airspace is controlled by the military, and they arbitrarily shut down passenger routes at no notice.... just to prove that they can, I suppose.

And I suspect that headline figure of 25% might be severely under-representing the problem. I haven't been able to find any online definitions of 'delay', but I should think that, for most countries, the threshold is not going to be more than an hour, perhaps only 20 or 30 minutes.  In China, I can well imagine that it might be 2 or 3 hours, or even longer; half a day, a day, even longer.

I also note that nothing is said in that article (from the English edition of government mouthpiece, The People's Daily) about the percentage of flights that are 'cancelled' entirely. As I see it, that presents two rather troubling possibilities (probabilities!): a) flights are never deemed to be 'cancelled' in the glorious People's Republic of China, they are merely indefinitely 'delayed'; or b) 'cancelled' flights are not counted among the 'delayed' flights, and thus the actual total of 'delayed and/or cancelled flights' may be much higher.

Really. I used to work with a statistics bureau: this is how statistics are massaged here - terms of reference are not properly defined, sources are never checked, slapdash methodology is the norm, and nothing is ever challenged. Official figures about anything in this country are, at best, deeply inaccurate, at worst, largely fabricated, and, as a result, almost invariably quite meaningless.

Encountering at least one delay of an hour or five is almost inevitable if you fly four times in a couple of weeks. That sort of thing you learn to take in your stride, with a weary smile. I'll be GRATEFUL if I don't suffer another day-long hold-up like my horrendous experience in Hangzhou a few years back....