Chinese behaving badly

As international travel rises, so do complaints about conduct of ‘uncivilized’ Chinese tourists abroad

By Jonathan Manthorpe
Vancouver Sun

A Chinese tourist uses his mobile phone to show his friend a picture of a portrait in progress drawn by a street artist in Hong Kong. One official in Beijing has lamented the rude behaviour of many Chinese tourists, which has ‘damaged the image of Chinese people and caused vicious impact.’ Among the transgressions are spitting, not flushing tourists and queue jumping. (Photograph by: Anthony Wallace, AFP, Getty Images , Vancouver Sun)

As the number of Chinese tourists has soared from almost nil a few years ago to a world-leading 83 million last year, so has their reputation for rudeness and objectionable behaviour.

Their image is so bad that hotels from Thailand to Paris will not accept Chinese tourists, and the Beijing government is planning to introduce in October a law to regulate travellers’ behaviour.

At a recent national conference on the coming tourism law, one of China’s four vice-premiers, Wang Yang, lamented the “uncivilized behaviour” of some Chinese tourists.

Their displays of lack of “quality and breeding” have “damaged the image of Chinese people and caused vicious impact,” Wang said in a report published by the government-run People’s Daily newspaper.

“Improving the civilized quality of the citizens and building a good image of Chinese tourists are the obligations of governments at all levels and relevant agencies and companies,” said Wang.

It’s unclear how the Chinese law can be applied to tourists abroad. But a state-controlled newspaper, Global Times, quoted a tour operator as saying “It would be helpful to have legal grounds when communicating with clients about their behaviour in the future, giving us some power to restrain them.”

Wang, a former Communist party boss of Guangdong province bordering Hong Kong, said the main complaints against Chinese tourists are “talking loudly in public places, jaywalking, spitting and wilfully carving characters in scenic zones.”

People around the world who have contact with Chinese tourists report many other pieces of unseemly behaviour including not flushing toilets, ignoring no smoking signs, flouting traffic laws, littering, elbowing their way to the front of lineups, and allowing children to urinate or defecate in public.

But this is all undoubtedly a passing phase that stems from China’s rapid growth from being a largely peasant society to the world’s second largest economy by some measurements.

It is not as though it is a unique phenomenon.

When the United States’ postwar economic boom allowed middle class Americans to go globe-trotting, their behaviour quickly became the object of anger and derision.

The Ugly American tourist became a caricature who only travelled to reinforce his or her suspicion that the rest of the world was a dirty and threatening place.

The only safe way for an American to travel, so the generalization went, was within five minutes drive of the nearest Hilton hotel.

For the most part this clichéd national image has faded with the Americans’ years of experience of foreign travel.

But the Chinese are just at the beginning of this cycle.

Chinese tourists spent an estimated $102 billion last year, but some of these nouveau riche lack any sophistication to cushion the impact of their wealth.

They have become used to their money getting them what they want and can become loud and angry if thwarted.

In this, their behaviour abroad is the same as their behaviour at home.

At a more benign level, some apparently rude behaviour by Chinese tourists is simply from ignorance of local customs rather than arrogant self-regard.

There are, for example, reports of tourists in theatres in Europe and North America angering fellow members of the audience by fiddling with their glowing iPads during the performance. But often these people are simply following the plot of the performance in Chinese, something that is acceptable at home.

Many Chinese tour companies now give their clients briefings on local customs and behavioural dos and don’ts in the destination countries to try to avoid such culture clashes and the inevitable stain on the national image that follows.

This cannot obscure the fact that some activities by Chinese tourists are purposeful.

Resort hotels in the Indian Ocean nation of idyllic tropical islands, the Maldives, are a favourite honeymoon destination. But competition is stiff from other equally alluring places such as the Seychelles and Mauritius.

So hotels in the Maldives often offer special incentives to honeymooners such as bottles of champagne in the room, free spa visits and romantic sunset dinners.

But a Hong Kong newspaper has reported that some Chinese travel agencies are supplying their clients with fake new wedding certificates in order to take advantage of these freebies.

Genuine honeymooners report their romantic experience being debased by the company of loud elderly “honeymooners” with equally loud grown-up children and even same-sex newlyweds, even though such unions are not legal in China.

And it is probably better to draw a veil over exactly why all brothels in Tokyo’s famous Yoshiwara red light district are imposing a blanket ban on Chinese customers because of “cultural differences.”

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