Lunar New Year 2026: China’s Logistics System Braces For A Familiar Shock

China’s logistics sector is entering its most disruptive season of the year as Lunar New Year (Feb. 17, 2026) approaches, triggering a rapid wind-down in factory output, trucking availability and warehouse operations. The official mainland public holiday has been extended to Feb. 15–23 this year, stretching the “stop-start” effect that shippers typically feel well beyond a single week.

In the run-up, the pressure point is inland: as workers travel home, manufacturers ship out finished goods early, while drivers and depot staff thin out — tightening capacity for drayage to ports and cross-province trucking. China is also preparing for a record 9.5 billion passenger trips during the broader Spring Festival travel season, a scale that can crowd transport corridors and complicate last-mile movement around key industrial regions.

At the coast, forwarders and carriers are managing the surge-and-silence pattern with heavier schedule trimming. Industry guidance circulating among shippers points to an unusually concentrated disruption window from late January into late February, as carriers deploy blank sailings (cancelled voyages) and roll cargo to later departures when terminals and yards hit peak density. One planning guide cited 107 blank sailings scheduled for February 2026, underscoring how aggressively capacity is being managed around the holiday.

Air cargo is seeing the same squeeze, particularly for high-value electronics, urgent replenishment and e-commerce lanes: forwarders have warned shippers to lock in uplift early as factories rush exports before closures and carriers adjust schedules. Market updates in late January and early February show the typical pre-holiday demand pulse followed by volatility as the region heads into shutdown.

The wider Far East feels the knock-on effects because Lunar New Year disrupts production and transport beyond mainland China: capacity crunch warnings have also covered South Korea and Taiwan, and shippers frequently reroute or “position” cargo through hubs such as Singapore and Hong Kong when direct routings tighten. The result is a short-term reshuffling of vessel space, feeder connections, and airfreight allocations across East and Southeast Asia — followed by a post-holiday restart in which backlogs clear unevenly as labour returns in waves.

Finally, the 2026 backdrop matters: with freight markets already wrestling with rate pressure and capacity dynamics, carriers’ use of blank sailings around Lunar New Year is also a tool to stabilise utilisation. That means shippers may see fewer “extra” sailings to absorb last-minute volumes — and more hard cut-offs — even if headline spot rates are not surging the way they did in some earlier years.