Police at Shanghai Railway Station revealed that they nabbed more than 100 ticket scalpers last week, detaining 28 of them for up to 15 days.

But the city's successful ticket scalpers seem to far outnumber the unlucky ones behind bars.

Yesterday, this reporter made a spot survey around Shanghai Railway Station. Between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., crowds of passengers were queuing up at ticket counters in order to secure a trip back home for Spring Festival, and cops were busy maintaining the order. Meanwhile, scores of suspicious-looking ticket scalpers were to be seen wondering around the station. Most of them were old women.

"Hangzhou (in Zhejiang Province), Changzhou (in Jiangsu Province)," an old woman murmured place names at the square, like a pupil reciting Chinese famous cities' names for a geography examination.

Upon being asked whether she had a ticket for Beijing (or cities far away from Shanghai), she would ask, "via railway or road?"

Then she would tell you, to avoid immediate police apprehension, "I have no ticket in hand. I will go and get one for you if you really need the ticket." She would then leave to get confirmation from the scalpers holding the underground tickets.

One of the scalpers' ticket sources are the people who don't need tickets they have already bought.

Many people who wanted to sell their tickets owing to change of schedule would rather look for the potential buyers outside the long queues than line up to get refunded.

"It is hard to buy a ticket for home and I don't want to waste too much time in getting tickets refunded," said a girl in her 20's. She had to re-arrange her schedule for returning home to Chongqing Municipality and waved her ticket to see if anyone wanted to buy it.

Scalpers can net big profits on a deal. For example, a ticket for Nanjing in Jiangsu Province at the price of 37 yuan can be got by scalpers by 25 yuan from the holders if they are in a hurry to sell. It was then sold to another buyer at a higher price than its face value.

(eastday.com January 27, 2003)