China braces for record 2.1 million daily border crossings over 2026 New Year break

China’s National Immigration Administration (NIA) expects an average of more than 2.1 million inbound and outbound trips to pass through the country’s land, sea and air checkpoints each day during the three-day New Year holiday that starts on Thursday, January 1. The projection represents a 22.4 percent jump on the same period last year and caps a year in which cross-border volumes have climbed back to – and in some hubs exceeded – pre-pandemic levels.

Peak traffic is forecast on the evenings of 31 December and 1 January. Shanghai Pudong International Airport alone is expected to handle 97,000 passengers per day, followed by Guangzhou Baiyun (53,000) and Beijing Capital (43,000). Regional gateways such as Chengdu Tianfu and Shenzhen Bao’an will also see heavy loads, with 19,000 and 18,000 daily movements respectively.



To keep queues under control, the NIA has ordered border inspection units to open all passport counters at peak times, publish real-time wait-time data on social media, and deploy mobile clearance kiosks that can issue electronic entry stamps within 15 seconds. The agency said it will push targeted travel advisories through WeChat and Alipay mini-programs so that travellers can stagger arrival times and pre-file customs declarations.

For multinational firms the message is clear: factor in longer dwell times at major airports, advise travelling staff to arrive at least three hours before departure, and build contingency buffers into supply-chain schedules that rely on human hand-carry or on-site engineering support. Travel managers are also being urged to remind employees to keep boarding passes and entry receipts, because China’s tax bureau still requires hard proof of travel when claiming deductible expenses.

The holiday surge crowns a year of steady liberalisation in China’s immigration environment, including the extension of visa-free entry to 45 countries and the expansion of the 240-hour transit-visa regime to 65 ports. Analysts say the coming weekend will be an important stress test of those reforms – and a bell-wether for the much larger Lunar New Year rush that starts in late January.