Millions of angry Chinese face another frustrating weekend stranded outside transports hubs across China even though the country’s transport system finally began to grind back into life today after the worst snow and ice storms for 50 years.

Passengers began to flow out of airports, train stations and bus depots, but nowhere near quickly enough to clear the backlog as millions of Chinese attempt to travel home for the lunar new year, the country’s busiest holiday period.

An estimated 180 million people will go home home to their families for the holiday beginning on February 7, in what is thought to be the largest annual human migration in the world. For many migrant workers, it is the only chance they get to see their families.

In Guangzhou, the capital of southern Guangdong province, 500,000 people were waiting to leave airports and train and bus stations, according to media reports.

Elsewhere local authorities were forced to ramp up security to keep miserable passengers in order.

As migrant workers contemplated either more waiting or separation from their families over the holiday, the government said that the weeks of heavy snow and icy conditions had caused $7.5 billion of damage.

Half a million troops and 14,0000 nurses have been dispatched across the country in the past week to aid those stranded by the weather. The transport chaos has strangled distribution of coal leading to what has been called the worst energy crisis in memory with blackouts in 17 provinces, according to reports.

The severe storms have led to the evacuation of 1.76 million people, killed dozens, and affected at least 105 million people in the country of 1.3 billion, according to official figures.

The freak weather has even carpeted the arid Taklamakan desert in far-western China with snow, the state news agency Xinhua reported.

"Never before had the whole desert been covered," it said.

The China Meteorological Administration warned that several of the worst affected provinces in central, eastern and southern China were in for further snowstorms and freezing rain this weekend.

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