Think Chinese tourists are annoying? They feel the same way about you

When it comes to covering China, Western media tends to stick to a short list of well-tread narratives.

1. The Chinese government censors and oppresses its people

2. Chinese cities are overcrowded and heavily polluted

3. Chinese workers are overworked and grossly underpaid

Whether it’s a story about iPads or Ai Weiwei, you can be sure that most editorials on life in the People’s Republic will check a few of these boxes. But that’s a problem because these narratives present a uniformly negative portrait of China to the West—and one with little nuance.

Let’s stop for a moment, though, and consider a critical question: Have you seen that video where the angry Chinese shopper throws wads and wads of money into a shopkeeper’s face? No? You’ve gotta watch it:

Ridiculous, right? Watch it again. It’s completely absurd—she’s literally throwing money in that poor woman’s face!

This brings to mind a fourth narrative arc: our fascination with “the wacky Chinese.” We see this in such viral stories as the Chinese zoo passing off a dog as a lion, Chinese women wearing head-to-toe "facekini" bathing suits, and the Chinese husband that sued his wife for giving birth to an ugly baby (which, for the record, is just a widely reported urban legend).

But these clickbait stories take on a much uglier tone when Chinese citizens leave their own shores, leading to the relatively recent birth of a fifth media narrative: that Chinese tourists are petulant, uncivilized children.

Chinese tourists are petulant, uncivilized children.

In Hong Kong, where locals have a notoriously bad relationship with “mainlanders,” fascination with Chinese misbehavior abroad has morphed into a journalistic cottage industry. In my three years living there, I learned that Hongkongers voraciously consume news stories about mainlanders wrestling aircraft doors open because they’re drunk or need “some fresh air,” mainlanders letting their children crap on everything from trains to planes, and mainlanders drawing ire for spitting, littering, vandalizing, cutting lines, or throwing violent tantrums when they don’t get their way.

These stories will only get more plentiful. It’s expected that China’s 100 million annual vacationers will balloon to 200 million by 2020. But as a former expat who lived in Asia, I also witnessed a reverse phenomenon, as Westerners increasingly flood Chinese cities to reap the fruits of a huge and rapidly globalizing economy. The Chinese government, for one, is working hard to expand that migration.

Foreigners consume, complain, teach, and travel within China’s borders, yet little is heard in the West about how Chinese people feel about their growing roster of international guests. So, I asked them.

Last spring, I stumbled into a job in Chinese television hosting an English-language talk show called China Chats. For one episode, my producer and I staged man-on-the-street interviews in Guangzhou—a giant metropolis about 90 minutes northwest of Hong Kong and China’s third-largest city—to ask locals about their biggest Western-tourist pet peeves.

You can watch the full video, below, but for summary’s sake, here are the five things that our Chinese interviewees found most annoying about their Western guests.

“I don’t know many foreigners,” one man admitted, “but I imagine they date around a lot.” It’s traditional values versus Tinder, and some of the locals we interviewed had suspicions that foreign men were serial womanizers who traveled abroad to sleep with Chinese women.

“They always go clubbing,” one woman added, “walking up to strangers with a drink, chitchatting and hooking up.”

Meanwhile, another woman classified Western immigrants as “very open and proactive” sexually, saying that they’re more likely than locals to be promiscuous.

“I feel like they always go out at night, and I don’t get it” one man said. “Is it because of jet lag?”

Locals’ complaints about expats often highlight the gap between Western and Eastern values—specifically, the tendency for Chinese people to be more conservative than their foreign counterparts. Many local youth, as was true of older generations in the West, still live at home until they’re finished school or they get married; as a result, some locals still view a hard-partying lifestyle as taboo.

This complaint also speaks to the fact that East and Southeast Asian countries tend to attract twentysomething Western gap-year travelers or overseas workers who are abroad to sightsee and party. In addition, the fact that booze is cheap, clubs and youth hostels are plentiful, and there are no repercussions for drinking on the street, can lead some expats to see their adopted home as a drunken playground. It partially explains the promiscuity, too.

At least one article I’ve read about Chinese tourists classified them as the new “ugly Americans,” a decades-old reference to American tourists’ reputation overseas as loud, rude, and culturally unaware. To the locals we interviewed, the latter point remains true of their international guests.

“Foreigners don’t understand enough [about] the Chinese way of communicating,” one woman said, adding that Westerners aren’t sensitive to societal norms.

A lack of Mandarin proficiency was also criticized.

“One thing I don’t understand about expats here,” one man said, “is that some of them have lived in China for many years, but still don’t have any basic shopping vocabulary.”

The term “FILTH” is thrown around a lot among British expats in Hong Kong, and it’s short for “Failed In London, Try HK.”

This harsh sentiment—that immigration to China appeals to the worst Western workers, rather than the best—was shared by a number of the locals we interviewed, and is primarily aimed at the country’s foreign English teachers.

“Just because they are native English speakers,” one interviewee said, “doesn’t mean they understand Chinese culture well enough to teach Chinese students.”

We heard this complaint about both employees and employers; locals blame the undereducated expats who see language instruction as an easy payday, as well as the Chinese companies who automatically assume white skin equals competence.

There’s frustration among locals that white people are treated so well in China simply because of their skin color. “A foreigner in China, however normal he might be back home, will be treated like a VIP,” one man said.

Many Chinese employers associate whiteness with prestige, and they’ll go out of their way to hire a white person to establish a more global image. “Some [foreigners] have no skills, no college degrees, and don’t respect others. They come to China to exploit local labor,” another man said.

Thanks to my own experience as a white man in China, I find it hard to argue this last point. I’ve spoken to others like myself who regularly attached a headshot to a resume to guarantee an interview. I also know people who worked in China as “white guys for hire,” freelancers who used their token whiteness for financial gain, parading around at business conferences and sitting in on corporate meetings. In fact, this practice is so widespread that the last season of Vice’s HBO show did an entire episode on these “face jobs.”