The world is hesitantly, and willingly or unwillingly, ending up in business relationships with China. The Eurocrats eye the Middle Kingdom with suspicion, jumping on the opportunity to imposed their much-loved tariffs on Chinese PV manufacturers as retaliation for their dumping practices. Chinese warships tease their way further eastward in the Pacific while the US remains lost deep inside a server farm looking for traces of sino-hacking.
Here on the mainland, a new focus has been found the outpouring of netizens discontent, and for once it has nothing to do what other countries do. For the question on the minds of many at the moment is “Why can’t Chinese people behave?”
Fifteen year old Nanjinger Ding Jinhao sprang to fame last month for defacing a 3,500 year old artifact at Luxor in Egypt. He wrote, somewhat imaginatively, “Ding Jinhao woz here”. He was of course, doing what all right minded teenagers in any country in the world do, or at least think about doing. Indeed, as a major tourist draw, graffiti in Egypt is far from limited to Chinese. Yet the young Mr. Ding has ignited a storm of debate back in his home of China.
As the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, the People’s Daily has recently, and more eloquently put down in print just that which has been electronically circulating the country’s social media since the story broke. The paper’s editorial included the belief that “this instance shows our families and schools have failed to deliver to the children something that should be expected first and foremost of any education: moral principles and civic virtues”.
The tide of dissatisfaction stems from even higher. Vice Premier Wang Yang complained, “[Such behaviour] damages the image of the Chinese people and has a very bad impact”.
The incident has even caused the National Tourism Administration to in the last week issue a code of conduct for Chinese going abroad that advises over eight key points of etiquette.
The list of offensive behaviour of which Chinese netizens are now accusing their country mates during their trips abroad runs to gauntlet from spitting, littering and not flushing the toilet, to talking loudly in public and laying elevators to siege coupled with an incapacity to queue.
What makes this particular bout of soul searching all the more discomforting is the knowledge that the 83 million Chinese tourists who travelled overseas last year are merely a representative sample of the kind of behaviour rampantly and continuously on display at home.