For China, tourism is a tool.
The country sees it as a facilitator of people-to-people communication and a way to spread international friendship. In other words: soft power.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said as much last May during a global tourism conference in Beijing. And he repeated it in November at a meeting of 16 Central and Eastern European (CEEC) heads of state, hundreds of company representatives and a big Chinese delegation led by the premier in Riga, Latvia. (Your humble author had the opportunity to give a keynote on China’s outbound tourism from the same stage shortly afterwards, pointing out the opportunities for Central and Eastern Europe due to the growing Chinese outbound tourism offers to Latvia, Poland, Hungary and other countries.)
Soft Power as a concept was officially introduced 10 years ago with a speech of the then-president Hu Jintao during the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. The Olympic Games 2008 in Beijing, the EXPO 2010 in Shanghai, the establishment of more than 500 Confucius Institutes around the world, the attempts to establish TV stations on a par with BBC, CNN and Al-Jazeera are all part of this policy. The “One Belt, One Road” program, in which the China-CEEC cooperation is embedded, is the latest push in this direction.
"Teaching" tourists
However, in the discussions during the evening reception, most participants were first asking questions and offering stories about different forms of outrageous behavior seen among Chinese travelers. Chinese government efforts to use outbound tourism as a soft power tool as a means of increasing the sympathy of ordinary people towards China have, at least in Europe and other Western countries, not proven to be particularly successful up to now.
Since 2006, the Chinese government has been trying to educate Chinese outbound tourists. That year saw the publication of the first “Tourism Etiquette Rules for Chinese Citizens Traveling Abroad” brochure, and a great deal of similar material has been released since. Recently many tour operators have had to make sure that their customers sign a letter of commitment, pledging that they will behave in a civilized manner and, as they are “ambassadors of China,” not discredit their country’s image. A blacklist managed by the China Air Transport Association even tries to shame misbehaving tourists by publishing their name and photo in the media and having them banned from boarding international flights at Chinese airports for two years.
Not surprisingly, all such efforts have little effect upon those Chinese travelers who think that the whole world functions like China. This can mean that either rules can be suspended if you pay more money, that you should always try to get as much for your buck as possible, or that you do not care too much for strangers and for places you will probably never visit again.
Looking back on 2016
Looking back at 2016, well-known tropes continued to come up again and again: Hotel buffets were raided, unhappy passengers threw cups of water, hot instant noodles or tea at stewardesses, or opened emergency exits in aircrafts to get some fresh air, to protest delays or to get faster out of the aircraft. During Christmas, 100 of these travelers battled with police at Hokkaido airport as they demanded that their flights, grounded by heavy snow, should depart promptly.
Citizens in Hong Kong, South Korea and Thailand (to name a few) are signing petitions to stop the Chinese from arriving in such large numbers, after having to combat with the desecration of holy temples, pools and cherry trees and people mistaking public areas as toilets.
Meanwhile residents of island destinations such as the Maldives or Palau were horrified by Chinese snorkelers breaking off pieces of coral and spearfishing protected fish. There was even a story involving two visitors to Japan who tried to steal a heated toilet seat from their Tokyo hotel room.
Not a true representation
But these Chinese miscreants clearly represent the minority of Chinese outbound travelers. So why are the many well-behaved individual travelers from China not changing the image of the loud, disrespectful Chinese outbound tourists?
It seems that they are highly visible and are immediately identifiable as Chinese travelers, thereby confirming existing prejudices, whereas their English-speaking, travel-savvy compatriots are not so visible since they do not act outrageously and, in most cases, are not even identified as Chinese, but rather as citizens from other Asians countries or as American-born Chinese.
In the recently published book “The World Meets Asian Tourists,” edited by Philip L. Pearce and Wu Mao-Ying, Wu writes that “the boorish behavior of any group of national citizens matters, but such acts are less important if the tourists from a source country number in the hundreds. When they can be counted in millions, the urgency of finding ways to shift from unacceptable behaviors to tolerable manners is a matter of considerable urgency.”
Nobody working in the field of China’s outbound tourism will disagree with that statement.
