Migrant workers bear the brunt of China's transport chaos as cold snap continues

China travel chaos, Guangzhou station
A sick passenger is passed over waiting crowds at Guangzhou railway station in southern China. Photograph: Sun Tao/Getty Images
It should have been her last journey. Zhao Baoqin was going home: not just for the new year, like so many migrant workers, but for good. She had laboured for years in a wool factory, paying her daughter's way through school and then university. Now the new graduate had promised to support her mother in turn.

But Zhao lies unconscious in a hospital in Guangzhou, her bones broken and her face purple with bruises, after falling from a bridge on Saturday in a desperate push to get inside the packed railway station.

Outside, the temperature is a mild 8C (46F), but the bitter weather plaguing eastern and central China for weeks has wreaked havoc here, too.

Ice and snow storms paralysed much of the country's transport system at its busiest time - the new year, migrant workers' one chance to return home to see their families. Though trains are running again, the passengers who manage to depart are swiftly replaced by thousands more from the factories of China's southern manufacturing heartland.

The state media say Beijing has launched "a war against the weather" and Guangzhou is its southern front. The street to the station is barricaded, with hundreds of soldiers and police stewarding travellers from one choke point to the next.

The passengers look like refugees; laden with cheap cases, sagging boxes and anxiety. In each surge forward, they jostle and shove. Even the new-found city swagger of young men dissolves in the steady drizzle.

Zhao arrived here with friends on January 26, as the numbers at the station began to swell to 700,000 or more. They queued in the rain and slept on the street, but the 45-year-old was buoyant as she talked about her happiness at fulfilling her dream of helping her daughter and leaving factory life.

Anyuan village in Gansu, north-west China, has little to offer its residents; no wealth, not even a reliable water supply. But for Zhao it was her only real home and she was determined to make the 34-hour train journey.

Zhao's cousin Yang Xiaoying, also from Gansu, said: "After five days, we really couldn't find any other way to get in to the station - there were too many people and it was just too crowded. So she handed her bag from one bridge to the other and I was just about to say 'wait a second - I'll help you across'. But she had already fallen.

"The government didn't do a good job. There was no discipline; no order. When they opened the gates, people just went through in a flood. Those who ... didn't have strength were just crushed. When she fell, if I hadn't cried out, she would have been crushed to death and no one would even have realised."

Zhao's family dare not tell her parents why she will not be home for the new year. They do not know if she will go home at all. "I'm illiterate but she brought me out here to work and treated me like her sister. She loved me and she helped me. Now I'm feeling very lonely and scared, worrying whether she will wake or not," Yang said.

Doctors told them Zhao's prospects are uncertain and say just stabilising her condition will cost 80,000 yuan (more than £5,000); eight times as much as she earned in a whole year of 14- or 15-hour days. "We have brought money and other people have given, but we only have 27,000. Her home town is poor. If we don't get enough money, we will probably have to give her up," said Zhao's friend Wei Erling, a taxi driver.

"She's lived a very simple life; she's never had luxurious food or clothes, because she wanted to support her daughter. Of course, if she was someone 'important', people would pay more attention to what happened. The government and railway are taking no responsibility."

The crush has now eased around the station, with extra police and soldiers drafted in to control the flow after the death of a woman trampled as travellers rushed for a train at the weekend.

Hundreds of thousands of workers also abandoned travel plans and applied for ticket refunds. But many appear to have been drawn back by the very improvements in the situation.

At the end of the long road that leads to the station, a loudspeaker van blares forlornly: "Dear passengers! Please stay in Guangzhou for spring break! You will have a nice festival in Guangzhou and are very welcome!"

Few can hear it over the shrill police whistles and the rumble of suitcase wheels.

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