Many people around the world have the view that China is full of ignorant, uncivilized, Chinese peasants... Unfortunately Chinese tour groups have led to a lot more people having this view.
-Joseph Sun, Chinese author (Wang, Pigs On the Loose, 2)
China is Eclipsing America
Those four words are basically the entire media narrative of the past twenty years, distilled down to a single sentence. The entire framework of discourse, from academe to government halls, from war-rooms to boardrooms to living rooms, has been that China was replacing America at the top of the world, stealing Uncle Sam's much-coveted titles one by one.
As the 2010's unfolded this narrative began to unravel. China did not replace the US as the world's largest economy by 2015, nor are they set to do so by 2020, or 2035. They did not replace the US as the world's leading military power. They did not replace the US as the world's leader in technology, diplomacy, or culture, if "culture" is the term you want to use for the drivel coming out of Hollywood. But there is one gold medal formerly held by the US that China has stolen in Earth-shatteringly grand style. It is the title of "world's worst tourists (Abad-Santos, The Atlantic)."
For decades the stereotype of the "Ugly American" formed the basis for many a nightmare that kept hapless European waiters and hotel clerks awake nights (Teel, Smarter Travel). It was probably a well-earned stereotype. I am one of the most nationalistic Americans ever born, but as a long-time expat I can say there have been plenty of times when groups of my countrymen, especially entitlement-minded twenty-somethings, have made me want to backhand them and stuff them in crates on the next cargo ship back to the States to prevent them from embarrassing the US any further with their boisterous idiocy.
Yet boisterous and idiotic though they may be, I can't seem to recall American tourists causing so much chaos that Japan would have to set aside separate areas for tourists, one for civilized Humans and one for us, as they are considering doing to minimize the damage done by Chinese hooliganism (Qin, Daily Mail), or that an upscale French hotel would put a ban on us, as Zadig and Voltaire had to do in Paris (Bond, Daily Mail). It's also worth noting that at least one hotel in Florence has adopted the same policy for similar reasons (Wang, Pigs, 6). I don't seem to recall reading about a rash of American tourists faking accidents overseas and demanding money from the locals, though the Chinese have made a name for themselves for this (Koetse, What's On Weibo). I can't think of any airline that has had to teach their flight attendants Kung Fu to deal with American passengers, as Hong Kong Airlines has had do to deal with their Mainland clientele (Lam, CNN).
It has been rumored that United Airlines has asked for the instructor's business card.
Perhaps they were afraid of an incident like the one on Air Asia flight FD 9101 from Bangkok to Nanjing, which had to divert after a Chinese passenger assaulted a flight attendant with boiling water and her boyfriend threatened to blow up the plane (Kositchotethana, Bangkok Post), or Air China CA433 in December, 2014 where a brawl broke out between Chinese tourists due to a crying baby (South China Morning Post, "Crying Baby Sparks Brawl"). Indeed, Chinese tourists have a well-enough-documented history of violence against flight crews and ground staff (Lau, SCMP; Li, Eva, SCMP; Jing (2), SCMP; Zuo, SCMP) to make combat training for flight attendants understandable. It won't help if the plane suffers engine failure because a Chinese tourist threw coins in the engine for good luck (Zheng, SCMP), if the cabin is depressurized by a moronic Mainlander looking for fresh air (Chen, Andrea, SCMP), or if the plane suffers a catastrophic equipment malfunction because of sloppy work by Chinese maintenance crews, but one problem at a time.
So just how bad are these travelers who believe they are they only civilized nation on the planet and that all others are barbarians (Mosher, Bully of Asia, 13)?
I'm glad you asked.
The World is Tired of China's Shit... Literally!
The low point in local-tourist relations here in Thailand's second-largest city was likely a photograph widely seen on the internet of a person, purportedly Chinese, defecating in the city's ancient moat.
(News.com.au)
Bathroom etiquette varies widely from one country to another, and in China... well, it's rough, and Chinese tourists tend to take their barbaric bathroom practices with them overseas. Echo Wang explains in Pigs.
People I have met have commented on Chinese using toilets. They say they would not enter a toilet after one of these groups had been in there, as the floor would be covered in urine and litter. Toilets would not be flushed and there would be shoe marks on seats and spit on everything.
(Page 13)
Yet as disgusting as the toilet habits of the Chinese are, I could probably forgive that if the ones who go abroad would at least learn to wait until they are actually IN the bathroom before tending to it!
I don't believe civilized tourists would even consider letting their children take a crap on a public sidewalk, for example. However, if you're from "the Great and Glorious Middle Kingdom," all the "outer barbarian nations" of the world are so far beneath you that they are nothing to you but a bathroom, whether you're on a London sidewalk, (Trayner, Daily Star), in a public pool in Thailand, (Li, Amy (1), SCMP), on someone's lawn in California (McKeown, Daily Star), in the showers on European trains (Gooding, Daily Star), in the aisle on a plane (SCMP, "The Toilet's Too Small"), at a national monument in Taiwan (AppleDailyEnglish, Youtube), or even inside the Louvre (Guilford, Quartz). It makes one think perhaps the pair of Chinese tourists who stole a toilet seat from a hotel room in Japan in 2016 (Zhou, Viola, SCMP) were hoping to put the seat to use in the middle of the next art gallery they visited. Perhaps that works better than a bottle in the middle of a restaurant, which is all one Mainlander could conjure up when her son had to pee on a 2013 trip to Hong Kong (Yahoo! News, "China Boy's Public Urination").
A dog can be trained not to do their business until they are outside.
A cat can be trained to go to a litterbox and even cover up its waste.
But Chinese tourists? No, it seems they are not up to the same level as dogs and cats yet.
Picture Putrid
From personal experience travelling throughout China and Southeast Asia, let me be frank: few things will ruin a trip faster than a horde of snorting, spitting, slobbering, loogey-hocking, belching nincompoops who smell like their last shower was in the Qing Dynasty and whose voices do not seem to have a volume level below that of a jet engine; but if anything can it is the headache of trying to get a photo of an idyllic panorama or magnificent architectural work and not being able to because some damnable Chinese (who can't seem to appreciate a photo unless it has their face in the middle of it) are taking 650 selfies in front of it!
Chinese tourists love photos of their travels and are always looking for the perfect shot. That by itself is not so damning; the same can be said of almost any traveler. But when coupled with the narcissistic vanity that underpins China's entire culture, this leads to a belief that it's not "the perfect shot" unless you are in it (for clarification, the selfie stick originated in China for this very reason), and they really do not care who is inconvenienced or what artifacts are damaged in their pursuit of this "perfect shot (Jing (3), SCMP)." Contrary to what the Zhonghua may believe of themselves, there are very few historical sites which are in any way visually enhanced by their presence in the shot...
...Unless of course the Chinese tourist inserting herself into the shot is a shapely vixen posing nude, which has been known to happen at Beijing's Forbidden City (Chan, Daily Mail), but I digress.
While risque photoshoots at historical sites featuring modern day Wu Zetians paying tribute to Lady Godiva are, I'm sorry to say, rather rare, the Daily Mail documents numerous instances of Chinese tourists in Japan ignoring signs (written in English, Japanese, and Chinese) and climbing cherry trees, picking blossoms and even breaking branches seeking selfies during the Sakura Festival, and goes on to note that these idiots do similar things to cherry trees during the brief blooming season in their own country (Qin). Cherry trees, for the record, are extremely sensitive and it takes very little tampering for them to succumb to a fatal bacterial infection.
Of course, the Chinese were quick to pin the blame for this on the Japanese. Chinese talk-show Huangqiu hinted it was Japan's fault for not educating Chinese tourists about Japan's cultural norms (Chu). There are a few problems with that.
- In what country is "don't act like a buffoon and break things" not considered a cultural norm?
- Is it the Japanese government's job to stop you at the airport and give you a class in basic etiquette?
- The outrage demonstrated by a handful of netizens in China when the same thing was done in Nanjing shows that the Chinese are VERY well aware that this was not acceptable behavior.
- There were signs outlining what behavior was prohibited, and these signs were printed in Japanese (for the benefit of the locals), English (for the benefit of everyone else), AND MANDARIN (for the benefit of Chinese, who cannot speak English despite 12 years of compulsory English education in their absolute joke of a school system).
There was even one commentator who insisted that the Chinese in question must have been paid by the Japanese government to act like fools so Japan could use it to defame China.
Because the Chinese can't make themselves look bad without Japan's help, right?
This shows what lengths the Chinese will go through to deny that it is their culture's fault, but more on that later.
In any case, endangering trees in their quest for the perfect selfie is not enough for some Chinese tourists. Some have broadened their horizons to endanger animals as well. In one recent incident a Chinese tourist in Switzerland injured a swan at a tourist attraction by grabbing it around the neck when it snatched away the paper she was using as bait to try and lure it in for a photo (McCarthy, SCMP). Just to make the situation even more ironic, the video capturing the incident includes a pan-over to a sign that clearly asks visitors not to feed the swans. As for why the woman was so determined to get a photo with the swan, she may have been attempting to one-up another Chinese tourist from the previous summer who risked injuring a seagull's wings by catching it and holding it with its wings open in high winds (Yan, SCMP). This habit of catching seagulls to pose for pictures is not new among Chinese tourists, who generated a great deal of backlash for it twice in December, 2015 (Huang, SCMP; Leng (1), SCMP) before giving the seagulls a hiatus in 2016 and switching the focus of their harassment to peacocks, costing the lives of two peacocks at a city zoo in Yunnan (Chan, SCMP).
When they are not endangering local flora or fauna in their quest for the ultimate selfie, Chinese tourists have made a name for themselves disrupting university life in Thailand (Fredrickson, Bangkok Post). In response to a Chinese B-movie called "Lost in Thailand," which was filmed in part at Chiang-Mai University, swarms of Chinese tourists have descended upon the city like a plague of locusts upon Egypt, and their peculiar behavior ranges from quirky, such as asking to borrow a school uniform and pose for a photo in it, to downright disruptive, such as sneaking into lecture halls and attending classes for free. The problem got so bad that the university had to have what is described as a "security crackdown" just to deal with the havoc wrought by the tourists (news.com.au, "Chinese Tourists"). The Republic of Korea's Ehwa Women's University reported similar disruptive behavior from Chinese tourists, with tourists taking wedding pictures on-campus in the middle of the school day and also causing some unease by photographing the students themselves (Kang, Korea Bang).
But look on the bright side. They may be loud, obnoxious, disgusting, dangerous to the wildlife and downright creepy, but it's not like they are going on a destructive rampage everywhere they go...
...right?
Leaving Their Mark on the World
It soon dawned on me that the real question to ask is: “Why are the Chinese rude?”
(Li, Amy (2), SCMP)
Can you imagine the tsunami of shrieking, nationalistic fury that would pour out of every media outlet in China if an American was caught carving his name into the Forbidden City or the Terra Cotta Army? Well, this is what a Ding Jinhao, a Chinese teenager, did to a carving at an Egyptian Temple in 2013 (Egyptian Streets, "Chinese Tourist"). One might attempt to excuse that by saying "he was just a boy; he didn't know any better." Never mind the obvious question "where were his parents?" However, while young Mr. Ding might have been acting out of childish ignorance, that excuse is unlikely to cover the legions of his countrymen who have embarked on a global crusade of vandalism.
I don't mind so much when they do it in their own country. Whether they are carving their names into the Forbidden City (Jing (3), SCMP), destroying Shanghai's Disney Park (Zhou (1), Laura, SCMP), ruining a field of painstakingly planted flowers so they can have a bouquet to take home so it can wither and die in a few days (Ge (1), SCMP), or destroying the only natural beauty left in the cesspool of pollution they call home (Tang, SCMP; Sun, SCMP), if cavemen want to trash their own cave, who cares?
When they go out into neighboring countries and start damaging reefs and killing wildlife in Malaysia (Lu, The Atlantic; Ruxyn, Says), Palau (Straits Times, "China Tourists Descend"), Indonesia (Travel Weekly Asia, "Chinese Tourists Spark Anger"), which they seem to have mistaken for a garbage dump (Smith, Telegraph), and of course the Philippines, where they are doing it not through imbecilic tourism but deliberately (Hayes, BBC), that is the point where their barbarism becomes a problem for more than just themselves, and the time to teach these Chinese brutes a lesson in respect is long overdue.
Noveau Reeks
You cannot reason with these kinds of people. They think they can do anything with their money.
-Jenny Wang, Travel Agent (Li, Amy (2), SCMP
"Rich Chinese tourists are pushing the boundaries and unfortunately some of these places are bending to their will, particularly the newly rich, who think, 'If I'm paying money then I'm God.'
-Mei Zhang, WildChina CEO (Cripps, CNN
The countries hit the hardest by the plague of Chinese tourists are the ones nearest to China. In Thailand, for example, a resident of Lamphun (near Chiang Mai) wrote the following editorial.
Local businesspeople are complaining that Chinese tourists are too boisterous. They tend to drive speedily on the wrong side of the road, and often go against traffic on one-way streets. Chinese tourists also often stop in the middle of busy intersections – just to argue among themselves about directions.
Some hotel and guesthouse operators are turning them away because they say Chinese tourists often rent a room for two, but stay overnight in a group of four or five. They also deplore their tendencies to litter and hang their clothing on the balcony railing.
(The Nation, "A Clash of Cultures")
The writer later followed up on these remarks, adding that Chinese tourists tend to visit Buddhist Temples in Thailand wearing shorts (a violation of their religious norms), and that monks find it difficult to explain the problem due to the tourists' low (or often non-existent) English level. Even in cases where tourists do actually speak English their vocabulary does not seem to include the word "no," which they believe they can ignore by simply explaining "I am rich (Chavala, The Nation, 'Cultural Sensitivities can be Hard to Explain)." Perhaps this tendency to think money exempts them from rules stems from the fact that it DOES seem to do so in China, as was made evident by a Chinese tourist who insisted that her "loads of money" would protect her from the consequences if she carried out her threats of killing a tour guide (Gao, SCMP).
China's Mission Civilsatrice... to Itself
I have always been proud of my heritage and when people have often mistaken me as Korean, Thai, Vietnamese and Filipina, I have always corrected them and told them I am Chinese. However I now prefer to keep my national identity secret and if people mistake me as a national from another country I tend to let them think that.
(Wang, Pigs, 2)
As China's moronic tourists made such a name for themselves across the globe, it was impossible for the Chinese themselves -and their government- not to take note. There was a time when the Chinese actually had enough Human decency to recognize that this behavior was unacceptable and be embarrassed about it. That time has passed, but more on that later. At first, China's government issued a warning to avoid behavior which their Foreign Minister Wang Yang rightly called "uncivilized," which damages China's image (Branigan, The Guardian). The consensus among China's small community of sensible people was that education was the key to training Chinese tourists to act as civilized Human Beings (Wang, Pigs, 29; Li, Amy (2), SCMP). Of course, if education and international exposure are the keys to unlocking civilized behavior in a Chinese traveller, then this will certainly come as a shock to Lu Yong, a Chinese citizen holding positions at Penn State and China's Southwest University of Finance and Economics, who was fired from the latter position after his behavior led to his detention and ejection from a Shanghai to New York flight in 2015 (Leng (2), SCMP), but never mind.
This desire to educate the barbarism out of their citizenry prompted the Chinese government to issue a guidebook on civilized behavior (Fernquest, Bangkok Post. How humiliating must that have been for a country with a long history of thinking themselves to be the only civilized nation on the planet, surrounded by barbarians, to have to issue guidebooks on how to act civilized abroad? Well, apparently "don't be neanderthals" was too much for the People's Government to ask of its citizens. An Anhui resident surnamed Zhang was quoted by the Bangkok Post as saying "You cannot possibly look through all of the rules before you go travelling. Also the rules are different in different places. I think it's not very feasible."
What? You mean they expect you to actually read something about the customs of the country you are visiting before you go? My God, next thing you know they'll be expecting you to follow that country's laws while you're there too. Oh, the inhumanity!
Of course, China can publish all the guidebooks they want, but Echo Wang once more points out the weakness in this solution.
Although the Government of China is fully aware of the problem they have not yet developed the strategies that will eventually lead to eradication of reduction of the problem. Publishing guidelines on how to behave overseas does not mean that they will be followed.
(Pigs, 29)
To attempt to put some teeth in their guidebook the Chinese government did what they do best: imposed surveillance with Draconian penalties. Thus was born what was probably a precursor for China's social credit system: a system for the Chinese government to rank their tourists according to the level of barbarism they display when travelling abroad (Wan, SCMP).
By means of this system Chinese authorities can monitor the horrific tourists they have unleashed upon the world and penalize them if the chaos they cause is too damaging to China's all-important image. "Police, customs officers, border control and even bank credit agencies should be contacted if necessary," according to The Guardian ("'Misbehaving' Chinese Tourists"). Was this effective? Did the behavior of Chinese tourists improve? Not according to Binbin Ji, a Beijing resident who posted a video wherein she absolutely blasted her fellow tourists in Phuket, who insisted they had been to numerous other countries before and had been "allowed to take whatever [they] wanted (Williams, Daily Mail)."
If anything, their behavior got worse.
In fact, Chinese real-estate tycoon Guo Bin tried to make it chic and fashionable in China for overseas travellers to brag about what a nightmare they were for their host country, saying he was "right" to cause as much trouble as possible for the Japanese hotel he stayed in (Guo, What's On Weibo). Why? Because of China's eternal vendetta against Japan for having the audacity to invade the country that had previously launched two failed invasion attempts of Japan.
However, a few of his countrymen did criticize him for it. Because of the mess? No. The possible damage caused by the excess water? No. The inconvenience to his hosts? Most definitely not. Their criticism was that he was wasting water. Had he chosen a form of a mess to leave behind that did not involve resource consumption, his countrymen would have had precious little to say. It's likely his government would have defended him. And if anyone dared to actually stand up and say he should be held accountable for his disgusting behavior...
...Well, the Chinese have found a convenient catch-all for that.
Foolish Laowai, You Think You are Allowed to Criticize Us?! That is Racist!
There is this strong sense of patriotism and a bit of insecurity about our national identity... If a non-Chinese points fingers at this kind of behavior, almost all Chinese feel very defensive. They will say, 'That's racist against Chinese.'
-Mei Zhang (Cripps, CNN)
The reputation of Chinese tourists for being uncouth and downright uncivilized stretches from East Asia all the way to Europe. However, despite the seeming universality of these complaints against China, the West seems uneasy about broaching the subject of an entire nation that exhibits a behavior problem seemingly deep-rooted within their culture. In North America, stories about the chaos caused by Chinese tourists are downplayed because no one wants to be labelled 'the R-word.' You dare not run a story that singles out a nation (unless it's America) or a race (unless it's Caucasians) in any negative way lest you be crucified by the media for "bigotry." Washington Post's coverage of the previously mentioned Air Asia 9101 incident, for example, bent over backwards to try and say "the Chinese are not the only ones" by citing other incidents of so-called "air rage" around the world, none of which were anywhere near the severity of the assault by the Chinese passenger (Phillip, Washington Post). Huffington Post went a step further by trying to say Chinese tourists deserve sympathy because they grew up under oppression (Wang, Panpan, Huffington Post), though the writer offers no explanation of why people born in the former USSR, who also grew up under oppression, do not behave in such an animalistic manner. Stories in the Western papers then (which are toned down to avoid sounding racially discriminatory) do not do justice to the absolute nightmare that Chinese tourists turn almost any trip into.
...And it seems that the Chinese have picked up on this, and they have begun using it as a magic shield against any complaints over their beastly behavior.
For example, in the incident mentioned above, regarding a Chinese tourist allowing her son to pee in a bottle in the middle of restaurant (Yahoo! News), the mother was quick to say that the restaurant was discriminating against Mainlanders by saying anything.
"But a female waitress saw us and spoke loudly, saying there is a toilet upstairs," she wrote in an online forum later. "She repeated it five times until everyone was staring at me. My family and I were so depressed thanks to Hong Kongers' discriminating against mainlanders."
When a Chinese tourist in the Spring of 2018 was asked to leave a Japanese restaurant for not only overstaying the 90 minutes allotted at the buffet but tossing shrimp shells on the floor around her seat in what the restaurant manager said was the most disgusting display he had ever seen, the tourist was quick to claim she had been discriminated against (Chen, Stephen, SCMP). China's state-owned facebook propaganda page, China Global Television Network, ran the story and a few wumaos tried to make the same claims there.
When a group of Chinese collegiates left a Japanese Airbnb looking like a dump, including sanitary pads everywhere, the owner put his complaints on the internet for all to see. The students' immediate response was that the owner was only making it an issue because they were Chinese (9Gag, "Tourists"). When it turned out that the owner was, in fact, Chinese, the students insisted the owner was a "traitor."
And of course, in the Ehwa University situation mentioned above (Korea Bang), there was a predictable outpouring of nonsensical assertions that the university would not have found this behavior problematic if the ones engaging in it had been white.
This trend of vindictive insecurity among the Chinese is, of course, a natural and rather predictable outcome when a society whose entire cultural identity is predicated upon the assumption of their own superiority comes under such frequent criticism. In their minds, the Great and Glorious Middle Kingdom, the Magnificent Wellspring of All Civilization, cannot be flawed. It must be that a petty and jealous world, full of "Hostile Western Anti-China Forces," is scheming to keep Mighty China down.
And that is precisely the line the Chinese government has gone with.
Having seemingly given up on attempting to civilize their tourists, the Chinese government has adopted a new strategy: blame the world for not quietly acquiescing to them.
The "Mighty Motherland"
The Chinese have the idea that since the Opium Wars they've been oppressed and looked down on, so now they're coming back rich.
Dr. Wolfgang Arlt, China Outbound Tourism Research Institute, (Cripps, CNN)
While the [Chinese] government meticulously maintains the world’s largest echo chamber, it fuels an intense brand of nationalism and a hostility to foreign influence. The result? Chinese exceptionalism and a sense of entitlement that breeds insufferably bad behavior.
(Volodzko, Japan Times)
In recent years, the Chinese government has actively sought to drum up a sense of Jingoistic nationalist self-superiority among the Chinese masses (Chung, Ejinsight, and they have succeeded. The evidence of this success is that Chinese tourists have gone from simply being inconsiderate of local customs and norms to being downright bellicose in their active pursuit of new ways to violate them. And like most things involving China, it started as a nuisance and became a real threat to safety.
A 2015 tour group to Thailand (a frequent victim of Chinese tourism), had their flight delayed by 10 hours. Naturally they weren't happy, but flight delays are a simple fact of travel. Civilized tourists have enough sense not to assume that the airport staff are causing the delays simply to spite you. Chinese tourists, however, are another matter. When their group was asked to leave the departure hall (probably because the airport staff were afraid a tourist would take a crap in the middle of it), they refused, and began belting out "March of the Volunteers," the drunken bar-tune China uses for a national anthem (Zhou, Laura (2), SCMP) and demanding financial compensation (Ji, Carnoc). Weibo users describing the incident made it clear that the passengers expected the airline to fix the delay no matter what it took, and that their failure to do so was disrespectful to China. Weibo user @皇家拖拉机SAMA wrote "This incident, not Thailand does not respect our tourists (sic), and Don't put China in the eye." It follows, then, that the basis for their expectation of special treatment was, in fact, their national identity. "It doesn't matter if it is your fault, Laowai, we Zhonghua are not happy. Therefore, you must atone."
This trend of in-your-face nationalistic jackassery continued in May, 2016 when a group of 30 Chinese hooligans on vacation in New York broke into a shrieking, off-key rendition of a Chinese Revolutionary song outside UN Headquarters praising the work of Mao Zedong in his "glorious crusade against Imperialism (Ge (2), SCMP)," and by "Imperialism" Mao never hid the fact that he meant "America."
For an American to match this in tastelessness, you'd have to walk into a veterans' memorial in Vietnam and begin shrieking "The Star-Spangled Banner."
However, Chinese tourists were not content to simply be offensive. They had to promote themselves to dangerous. In South Korea one Chinese tourist murdered a local woman inside a cathedral (KH디지털2, korea Herald) and felt this was acceptable because she reminded him of his ex-wife (Volodzko, Japan Times). When he was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment for it he did not understand why, and attempted to get his government to intervene. This was not the only time that year that Chinese tourists went on a violent rampage on Jeju island, but one Chinese citizen who recently purchased a home in Jeju felt certain that the locals would quietly accept it because they "need to rely on Chinese tourists for business (Steger & Huang, Quartz)." In short, the Chinese are quite open about their belief that they are not bound by laws or subject to the consequences of their actions because they feel that the "lesser nations" are dependent on "great and glorious China."
The worst aspect of this "screw you, we're Chinese" attitude is that their government has now taken up the same chorus.
This September, a group of Chinese tourists took a vacation to Sweden. However, in an example of classic Zhonghua incompetence, they booked their hotel for the wrong date. When they arrived at the hotel and attempted to check-in, the hotel staff explained that they had booked incorrectly (Aftonbladet, "Diplomatic crisis"). Naturally, the Chinese (who, remember, are never wrong) blamed the hotel staff and refused to leave the hotel lobby, where it can be presumed from the above-mentioned litany of barbarism by their countrymen that they made quite a scene. Police were later called to remove them and the Chinese tourists shrieked that this was "killing (Tan, BBC)." What was the Chinese government's response?
The Chinese Embassy in Sweden not only condemned the police for daring to actually remove the squatters by force, an act which they referred to as a "brutal assault (Chinese Embassy in Sweden, 'The Chinese Embassy Spokesperson's remarks...'," but demanded an apology from the Swedish government and an investigation into the actions of the officers.
Sweden wasn't the only victim of Chinese tourists backed by a self-righteous embassy. In Thailand last week a Thai airport security guard was fired for slapping a Chinese teenager (Agence-France Press, SCMP), after pressure from the Chinese embassy. The problem is that the video, like so many videos used in allegations of "police brutality," is selectively edited to begin at the moment the officer strikes back. However, in the opening frames it is clear that the Chinese tourist was in aggressively close proximity to the guard, and his hand (which could be either in a fist or the classic pre-fight finger-point) was inches from the guard's face.
Go to any airport in China and do what this punk kid did. I can promise you the response will be violent.
But if you are Chinese, clearly you are allowed to be as violent as you want overseas and "barbarian vassals" are expected to simply accept it because you are Chinese.
Unfortunately the Thai government, fearing the loss of Chinese tourism (because they've done so much good for Chiang Mai, for example), actually gave in to this idiocy from the Chinese embassy and apologized. They apologized for a guard defending himself against an assault by a tourist who did not have proper documentation to enter the country in the first place! The irony of this fear of losing Chinese tourism income is that Thailand is not making that much off of it. In most Chinese tours to Thailand, every dime spent is funnelled back to China and all Thailand gets is the path of devastation the tourists leave in their wake Tuohy, SCMP)!
The Chinese think this is acceptable. They believe "lesser nations" should be grateful that the "heirs of the dragon" deign to grace us with their presence. The time has come to teach them otherwise. The days of dealing with the Chinese (whose government not only permits but supports this barbarism) under the pretense that they are ever going to be civilized have got to come to an end.