CHINA: Chinese Tourism Changing The World

Chinese tourism: 'Finally, we are seeing the world'
Chinese tourists now outspend holidaymakers from all other countries. But how will the superpower's taste for travel change the world of tourism and how can Britain cash in? Abigail Haworth reports from the favourite hot spot 'Chinese Beach' in Thailand

It's not the best afternoon to admire the view from the top of the observation tower in Pattaya, Thailand. The sky is thundery and the sea is a uniform shade of sludge. Shun-Wen Tong, a 22-year-old student from the Chinese city of Hangzhou, cranes his neck to look at the town 54 floors below: concrete hotel blocks, pulsating traffic and directly beneath him, half- hidden in the tropical gloom, an amusement park called Funny Land.

The off-season weather is just one of the dodgy things about Pattaya – a resort known to many as "Thailand's Blackpool", it is two hours outside Bangkok – but Tong is savouring every moment. "It's magical. I'm very happy," he says, holding his camera in one hand and a complimentary orange juice in the other. "Finally I am seeing the world."

Tong is on his first-ever overseas trip. For him it's a thrilling, life-changing experience. But to the rest of world he's not just any tourist. He's a Chinese tourist – that is, a global phenomenon, an unstoppable trend, a lucrative opportunity. International travel has been growing among the Chinese over the past decade, with rising prosperity at home and the relaxation of Communist government travel restrictions. Now millions are on the move. "Chinese tourism," said CNN breathlessly in April, "might be the biggest phenomenon to hit the global travel industry since the invention of commercial flight."

In 2012 the Chinese overtook Americans and Germans as the world's top international tourism spenders, heading off on 83m foreign trips and spending $102bn. By early 2015, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organisation, Chinese globetrotters will take more than 100m overseas trips. By 2020 the figure will double to an incredible 200m. In Thailand, the number of Chinese tourists shot up by 107% this year, nudging Bangkok ahead of London to become the world's most visited city in Mastercard's latest survey.

Everyone is scrambling for a share of the spoils. In October, the British government announced plans to simplify UK visa procedures for nationals from China, with the goal of trebling Chinese tourists to Britain by 2015. India has launched Chinese-language Life of Pi tours after the film was a box-office hit in China, while Greece is promoting "idyllic island honeymoons" to the Chinese market. Even the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe is currently trying to negotiate a "preferential tourism pact" with Beijing – despite diplomatic strains last year after police outside Harare arrested four Chinese migrant workers for allegedly killing and eating rare tortoises.

With the proliferating numbers has come the predictable but mostly misplaced sentiment that Chinese travellers have taken over from Americans as the world's new "ugly" tourists. The trend for independent travel is sharply on the rise, especially among the younger Chinese. But around half of all Chinese tourists still travel in organised groups – a factor that increases their collective visibility and amplifies stereotypes and cultural unfamiliarity on both sides.

Reports abound that Chinese tourists are loud and rude, or that they refuse to queue or give tips. Other complaints range from the practical to the surreal. In July, residents of the small Swiss city of Lucerne protested that up to 120 Chinese tour buses a day were paralysing local traffic, as they deposited tourists who wanted to buy luxury watches. Then there were bizarre reports, picked up by the Chinese media, of competing Chinese honeymooners brawling in French lavender fields over the best spot for photos to capture a "Monet moment". A group travelling to North Korea drew scorn for throwing sweets to children as though they were "feeding ducks", while a number of Chinese tourists in the Maldives were reportedly caught giving fake marriage papers to upmarket resorts in order to get free dinners offered to newlyweds.

Still, the fact that such tales make headlines seems to reflect the current hypersensitivity towards Chinese behaviour abroad more than anything else. In a recent poll by lifestyle website LivingSocial, Americans were still ranked the least popular foreign tourists by five different countries, including, tellingly, by Americans themselves. Brits and Germans fared little better.

Thailand is at the forefront of the boom. With its mix of temples, beaches and duty-free shopping, the self-styled "land of smiles" is the most popular destination for Chinese tourists after the satellite Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macao. Tong is visiting Thailand with 35 others from Hangzhou city in southeastern China, including his youthful-looking grandparents, on a seven-day organised tour. The tour cost £500 each, including flights.

"I wanted to come here to see the elephants and the Buddha statues. It's a very holy place," he says. "But my family chose it mostly because it's only a four-hour flight from China and we got a good deal."


We have take off: Chinese tourists jump for a picture on Tawaen Beach, known locally as Chinese Beach on Koh Larn near Pattaya.

Pattaya is on almost every Chinese tour group's itinerary. A former fishing village, it grew into a tourist playground during the Vietnam war, when American forces on R&R discovered its then-pristine, palm-fringed bay. Girly bars, theme parks and golf courses quickly multiplied. Today it attracts about 8 million tourists annually, including more than a million from China. Yet Chinese tourists are oddly absent from the town's teeming centre and main beaches.

They're not hard to find once you know where to look. Car parks jammed with coaches signal the mass presence of tour groups at Pattaya's numerous elephant shows, crocodile and snake farms, ladyboy cabarets and outlet shopping malls. In Thailand, the proportion of Chinese travelling in tour groups rises to 70%. Most tours go from one self-contained attraction to the next, stopping only for lunch at Chinese restaurants (eating Thai food is usually a separate activity) before returning for the evening to their high-rise hotels. It's left to the Russians – the other great tourist influx in recent years – to play chicken in the main bay on screaming jet skis and haggle with beach vendors over the price of polyester sarongs.

At Sriracha tiger zoo, which sees around 2,000 Chinese tourists daily, visitors can pose for photos with one of the 400 tigers kept in dusty enclosures. They can also "enjoy the intelligence of the pigs in the pig show" or shoot targets with air guns to make meat drop into feeding troughs in the Shoot 'N' Feed tiger arena. The zoo has existed for years amid controversy over whether the docile tigers are drugged or beaten, as well as its racial stereotyping policy of hiring Africans to pose in loincloths – but Chinese tourists on a schedule have no time to think about any of that.

Shu-Hsuan Chi and Tzu-Chen Wu, both in their 60s, are scuttling to a tiger-feeding session. The two women from the northeastern port city of Dalian worked in the same grocery shop. They are celebrating their retirement with a 10-day tour of Japan, Korea and Thailand. Pattaya is their last stop. "We have no economic problems in China now and free time to travel," says Wu. She is sporting a beehive hairstyle she has had done specially "to last for the whole trip" to avoid having to visit a foreign salon. "It has been tiring but enjoyable. We have many things to tell our family and friends about when we get back home."

Another tourist, 40-year-old property developer Min Liu from central Henan province, also says he'll have plenty to talk about when he returns. But most of it won't be positive. "This is the first and last time I will leave China," he says. He came overseas "out of curiosity" but thinks Thailand is inefficient and much more unsafe than China. "Also, the local food smells bad and the flavour is wrong. It's not suitable for Chinese people," says the burly bald-headed man.

The Chinese travel boom is similar to past waves of mass tourism among newly affluent middle classes. Thomas Cook basically invented the package tour in the 1850s when he began taking groups of British industrialists on two-week "grand circular tours" of Europe, sparking a new leisure activity among the well-heeled (who also grumbled about the exotic food). Americans followed with their loud voices and even louder leisurewear in the plentiful 1950s. Then came the Japanese, with their sun hats and cameras, in the "economic bubble" years of the 1970s and 80s.

A major difference today is that the global travel industry is much more developed and finely calibrated to maximising profit. Providing endless "attractions" and services to woo tourists is now gigantic business, with tourism currently worth an estimated 9% of global GDP. (The global arms industry, by random contrast, is worth an estimated 2.5%.) Even when tourists don't travel in groups, as fewer Chinese are doing as time goes on, it's not easy for countries to find the right balance between proscribing their activities and letting them discover places for themselves.

Pimpingfar Chokrapinnpass, a marketing officer at the Tourism Authority of Thailand, admits as much: "We want visitors to have authentic experiences of our culture and people, but it's not always possible because of the way the industry works."

Chinese tourism has been slow to take off in the UK partly because Britain is not included in the Schengen programme that allows travellers to visit most of Europe on a single visa – hence George Osborne's recent announcement of simplified visas. Only around 200,000 Chinese tourists visited Britain in 2012, while 1.4 million visited France.

No effort is being spared to promote British charms. In September, British Airways launched its new direct flight from the Chinese western hub of Chengdu to Heathrow by staging a surprise "Chinese panda flashmob dance" in a Chengdu shopping mall. About 50 people in panda suits were hired to wiggle to disco music against a Union Jack backdrop, including some dressed up as apparently famous British pandas such as David Beckham, Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter. There was even a panda Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with a baby panda George.

Dancing pandas won't solve everything. Take Barnsley, for example. The South Yorkshire town is the birthplace of James Taylor Hudson, a missionary widely credited with introducing Christianity to China in the 1850s. Some townspeople believe Barnsley could attract millions of Chinese pilgrims – there are around 70 million Christians in China – and even become "a new Bethlehem". In August, however, the Barnsley Chronicle reported that a Beijing woman who came to assess the town's potential said Chinese investors were "disappointed" with her findings. "Chinese visitors like midnight shopping, karaoke and massage, not bars and drinking," 58-year-old Mary Lui told the newspaper. "But they can't find it here in Barnsley."

Lui suggested the town should consider opening a 24-hour shopping centre, an "authentic" Chinese restaurant and a health centre. But who's to say that Christian-minded Chinese wouldn't find some redeeming features in Barnsley as it is? What the investors are really complaining about, it seems, is that there aren't enough big business ventures to make money from an influx of tourists. Wolfgang Georg Arlt of the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute says surveys and web forums inside China repeatedly show that modern tourists are "more open-minded". Both China and the west, he says, would do well to stop resorting to stereotypes and find out what people really like.

One such stereotype is of Chinese tourists as shopping obsessives who buy up the entire contents of luxury boutiques. Many Chinese do buy designer items overseas – in the coming year they are projected to buy more luxury goods than all other nationalities combined. Along with the usual aspirational love of status symbols, duties of up to 60% on such goods back home partially explain the phenomenon.

back in Pattaya, tour guide Angela Wu says shopping is rarely the sole reason for a foreign trip. Wu, 45, from Shanghai, is chain-smoking in the lobby of the Miss Tiffany transvestite cabaret show while her tour-group charges watch the evening's glittering performance. "Most people travel because they want to see something they can't see in China," she says. "They're interested in historical sites and famous art in Europe, and natural scenery in America and Australia."

Pattaya's spectacular ladyboys are another example of something they can't see back home. (On one tour group's itinerary, the Chinese word used to describe them translates as "person-creatures".) After the show, the sequin-bedecked performers in towering headdresses crowd into the lobby to pose for photographs with tourists for an extra charge of 40 baht (80p) a time. "Please inform management if the artists misbehave," says a large sign warning about potential overcharging. But on this occasion it's some of the Chinese men who misbehave by trying to squeeze the ladyboys' breasts during their photo sessions. "They think it's OK because the breasts are not real," says Wu wearily.

Wu, who has worked as a guide for 20 years within and outside China, says taking her countrymen and women overseas is like "going into battle". "No decision is ever simple. Everyone has an opinion that must be heard." But she doesn't believe that Chinese tourists deserve a wholesale reputation for being badly behaved. Like any nation, she says, "there are polite people and rude people" and most extreme cases of uncouth behaviour are isolated incidents that shouldn't tarnish all Chinese people.

There was outrage in May, for example, when it emerged that a teenage boy from the city of Nanjing had etched his name on a 3,500-year-old stone carving at a Luxor temple in Egypt. While the boy's parents publicly apologised, Chinese netizens pointed out that China's ancient Great Wall is covered with western graffiti.

Other incidents occur, Wu says, as a result of the acute disorientation that some people experience in alien surroundings. She cites one occasion when she took a group of provincial Chinese tourists to Sydney. "It was winter at home but summer in Australia, so I told them to go into the toilets when we got off the plane to change into light clothing." When they arrived, Wu found many people stripping down to their underwear at the arrivals gate, in view of other passengers. "They would never do that back in China. People were just confused," she says.

Nevertheless, mindful of the nation's image overseas, China's government issued a 64-page Handbook for Civilised Tourism in October containing safety tips and etiquette rules for its citizens abroad. Along with some useful advice, the booklet's rules include: "Don't steal the lifejacket from the airplane", "Don't leave footprints on toilet seats", "Don't take more than you can eat from breakfast buffets" and "Don't dry your smalls over hotel lampshades". There are also some country-specific tips, such as warning travellers to the UK that asking British people if they've eaten is "deemed impolite", and advising female tourists to wear earrings while in Spain, otherwise "they will be considered naked".

No wonder some people are confused. Luckily Shun-Wen Tong, the student I met at the top of Pattaya's observation tower, was not one of them. He emailed me when he returned to Hangzhou to say he had survived his package tour without any dramas. He wasn't quite as convinced as before that Thailand was "100% a holy country" after visiting a "sex show where ladies shot tropical fruit from their private parts", but he was impressed at how "spirituality and sexuality happily co-existed". Most of all, he said, the experience had given him the confidence to arrange his own trips abroad in future.

A few days later, Tong sent me a 10,000-word document in both English and Chinese entitled A Journal of My Travels, all about his time in Thailand. "I hope you like it," he wrote. "This is just the first instalment."