China is gearing up for the massive travel rush that comes with its annual Chinese New Year holiday, or Spring Festival, later this month. It's known as the world's biggest human migration, as tens of millions of people are expected to be on the move. People are busy preparing their travel plans and, as ever, there's a huge demand for train tickets with 15 million sold on Wednesday alone. The China State Railway Group says it's expecting about 440 million rail trips to be made during a special travel-rush window – up eight percent on the same period last year. 

Meanwhile, the operator of the high-speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai was granted approval for an IPO at the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The railway operator plans to sell nearly 6.3 billion shares, which could raise 29.2 billion yuan, or 4.2 billion U.S. dollars – the most on the Chinese mainland's stock markets since 2015.