Scalpers cornered not uprooted

Before the name-based system was adopted, scalpers had been widely complained for worsening the ticket shortage problem by stockpiling tickets and reselling them at higher prices as the country's railway transport capacity falls far short of its annual Spring Festival traffic demand.

During this travelling season from Jan. 30 to March 10, the railways were expected to transport 210 million passengers, up 9.5 percent year on year, or 5.25 million passengers per day, according to the Ministry of Railways.

Migrant worker Wang Xiangneng from central Hunan Province thought the real-name system had put a curb on scalpers. "Anyone can buy a ticket either by phone calls or at ticket booths now. It is really first-come and first-served," said Wang.

Taking himself as example, Wang said that a one-way ticket for a hard seat from Guangzhou to Shaoyang priced at 51 yuan used to be sold at least 200 yuan by scalpers in the past.

"If we were able to secure a ticket from the station or authorized outlets, we could have several days' pay spared. That is not a small amount for us," he said.

But there are people always trying to beat the new system to make illegal profits. Police in Guangdong have captured 837 illegal ticket vendors and confiscated more than 2,500 scalped tickets by Feb. 8.

In Chongqing where real-name train ticket selling system was formally activated Sunday to cope with another wave of traveling peak as migrant workers would soon return to the regions on east China coast for jobs, local police also cracked down several ticket scalping cases.

From two suspects, the police have seized 37 real-name tickets, 115 IDs for ticket booking via phone calls and four household registration booklets. The two suspects surnamed Wang and Gou separately confessed they would charge an extra 20 to 30 yuan for each ticket.

Yue Jinglun, director of the Social Policy Research Institute of the Guangzhou-based Sun Yat-sen University, said that there was much to be done to prevent the real-name system from being taken advantage of by scalpers.

"No one would deny that the trial operation has been a very positive step in securing the fair distribution of scarce train ticket resources. The key is to constantly optimize the system, rather than abandoning it for fear of defects," he said.

Huang Xin echoed that the way to tackle the train ticket shortage problem from the root was to expand the country's railway transport capacity. "At the core this is supply-and-demand problem," he said.