Recruiters hold up boards with job opportunities at a job market in Yiwu city, Zhejiang province, on Wednesday as the market reopened following the Spring Festival break. Thousands of enterprises from Yiwu and neighboring cities and counties were at the gathering looking to recruit workers.

Liao Fangping was looking tired when she arrived in Guangzhou Railway Station on Wednesday afternoon.

"The train was very crowded and the journey took about a dozen of hours," she said.

Liao, 28, carried her red knapsack out of the railway station and headed for a bus to continue toward her journey's end.

The migrant worker, who comes from Southwest China's Sichuan province, arrived at the shoe factory where she works in Guangzhou's Baiyun district an hour later.

She was part of a flood of migrant workers returning to Guangzhou from their hometowns after spending Chinese New Year with their families.

Guangzhou Railway Group Co reported that more than 700,000 passengers returned to Guangdong province by rail on Wednesday. Some 500,000 passengers arrived at railway stations in Guangzhou on Tuesday. The huge numbers are not likely to fall for at least a week.

Zhang Baoying, director of the service department at Guangzhou job center, said more than 91 percent of the city's migrant workers will return in the month following Spring Festival.

"Only a very small number of migrant workers will not return to Guangzhou after Spring Festival this year," Zhang predicted.