China has sent five inspection teams to the country's traffic hot spot areas to tackle the ticket scalping and issuing scandal, as millions of Chinese scramble for a ticket back home for the Spring Festival, according to a notice released Monday by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) on its website.

The teams will target ticket selling, a headache identified by an official in a blog posting which has aroused national indignation.

Li Ou, vice mayor of Siping City in northeast China's Jilin province, triggered heated discussion with a blog article on the country's flawed ticket selling system.

He wrote, the fact that many ticket offices did not sell enough tickets was because they wanted passengers to buy them on the trains and earn extra commission charges. Also railway stations are said to receive bonuses when selling the tickets to scalpers.

"Instead of seizing ticket scalpers around the railway station, the police should take hold of the problem's origin inside ticket offices and railway departments," Li added.

People stream into the Beijing West Railway Station in Beijing, capital of China, Saturday Jan. 17, 2009. China has sent five inspection teams to tackle the ticket scalping and issuing scandal, as millions of Chinese scramble for a ticket back home for the Spring Festival. [Xinhua]

An unnamed MPS official said the teams' work included inspecting ticket selling, monitoring the investigation of scalping cases and checking on security at stations.

The five teams' target municipalities and provinces are Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Fujian and Guangdong.

Police launched the "Blue Shield" campaign against scalpers on December 15, and to date have arrested more than 4,069 people and recovered 88,562 scalped train tickets with a face value of 3.71 million yuan (about US$540,000).

The Ministry of Railways (MOR) released its official hotline number for ticket scalpers' information on January 15. On Monday, hundreds of similar hot lines were set up in provinces across the country.

China restricts people to buy no more than five train tickets at each purchase. But as no identity certificate is required for the trade, scalpers are able to hoard tickets by queuing repeatedly or making bookings from different authorized ticket offices across a city.

They will then post ticket selling information through websites under fake names and wait for home-bound travelers and migrant workers to call and meet for trading. They resell the tickets with huge extra charges as customers are willing to pay a high price to be back with their families for the Lunar New Year.

However, the MOR has rejected calls for a real-name system in the sale of tickets in the festive period as it would merely add troubles as the huge passenger flow would make identity checks at train stations too time-consuming.

The MOR estimated it would serve 188 million passengers, up 8 percent from a year earlier, in the 40-day festival rush period starting from January 11. This year's Chinese Lunar New Year falls on January 26.

(China Daily January 21, 2009)