From faking marriage certificates to getting honeymoon discounts in the Maldives to letting children defecate on the floor of a Taiwan airport, Chinese tourists have recently found themselves at the centre of controversy and anger.
Thanks to microblogging sites in China, accounts of tourists behaving badly spread like wildfire across the country, provoking disgust, ire and soul-searching.
While in the past such reports might have been dismissed as attacks on the good nature of Chinese travellers, people in the world’s second-largest economy are starting to ask why their countrymen and women are so badly behaved.
“Objectively speaking, our tourists have relatively low-civilised characters,” said Liu Simin, researcher with the Tourism Research Centre of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
“Overseas travel is a new luxury, Chinese who can afford it compare with each other and want to show off,” Liu said. “Many Chinese tourists are just going abroad, and are often inexperienced and unfamiliar with overseas rules and norms.”
When a story broke recently that a 15-year-old Chinese boy had scratched his name into a 3,500-year-old temple in Egypt’s Luxor, the furore was such that questions were even asked about it at a Foreign Ministry news briefing.