Foreigners’ swim at Chinese ecology park causes ripple of protest online
- Bathers apparently refused to get out of lake at Nanhai Bay Forest Ecological Park despite repeated requests from workers
- Social media users ask why no one called the police
A video of three foreigners taking a swim in a lake at a nature park in southern China on Wednesday has caused upset online.
Footage of the trio splashing around in the water at Nanhai Bay Forest Ecological Park in Foshan, Guangdong province, was published by the video-sharing website Beijing Time.
The lake is off limits to tourists, with signs posted in the area, the report said.
A person who works at the park said the three people were spotted during a security patrol.
“We did not see anyone swimming while we on our usual patrols, but when the security guards were in the area someone told them there were foreigners swimming in the lake,” the unidentified worker was quoted as saying.
“So we walked up to the lake and asked them to get out,” the person said. “But it was about 20 minutes before they did.”
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When the guard asked them to be “civilised tourists”, the people said: “Ha ha! OK. We will get out immediately.”
The report did not say where the tourists were from or if they were men or women, but still images from the footage showed at least one of them was a woman.
“We tried to persuade them several times, but we could only ask, we could not drag them out,” the worker said.
Some people online were enraged by the tourists’ behaviour.
“Why did nobody call the police,” a person wrote on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblog service. “When will foreigners be treated the same as Chinese people?”
“Uncivilised tourists from so-called civilised countries do exist,” another person wrote.
