Tourists from the Chinese mainland have time and time again captured news headlines for their crass behavior in public, from leaving graffiti on Egyptian tombs, or allowing their infants to defecate in the streets. Recently, the antics of Chinese tourists in eateries in Vietnam and Thailand that were captured on film have gone viral on social media.
According to video footage, Chinese tourists in Vietnam surrounded a female waitress who was about to place a plate of fruit on a buffet table. Initially, the waitress handed out the fruit to extended hands, but chaos broke out when impatient eaters began snapping the fruit off the plate themselves.
Seemingly exasperated with having to fend off thieving hands, the waitress placed the fruit on the table. The plate was almost immediately cleared, and the waitress had to shove her way out of the crowd.
It is unknown when and where the incident in Vietnam took place.
Days before the Vietnam video, a similar clip of Chinese tourists piling their plates with shrimp at a buffet in Thailand was widely circulated online. King Power, the buffet where the incident took place, later issued a statement saying the video was from 2 years ago, according to Chinese news portal Netease.
The general sentiment of netizens on Chinese microblogging website Sina Weibo to the behavior of the Chinese tourists was that of deep shame.
Netizen “Li Boxiong Inn” felt that the Chinese tourists were “no different from pigs.”
“I’m reminded of how monkeys are fed at the zoo,” wrote -Lu sir-.”
“They look like they haven’t eaten in 800 years,” wrote “Sophie Marceau Loving Life” from Hubei.
A Shanghai netizen using the moniker “Flying Dragon Amid the Clouds 818468” wrote that the situation is reflective of a serious social problem in China: “We’ve only focused on the GDP and on getting a diploma, while moral education has fallen by the wayside. ‘The poor are those who only have money.’ I am not surprised to see such a shameful scene.”
