A THAI model caught up in a stampede of Chinese tourists has posted an angry rant online about their behaviour.
Duangjai Phichitamphon was waiting in line at the tourist tax refund desk at Jeju International Airport in South Korea when a group of Chinese tourists apparently pushed her out of the way and jumped the queue.
“Not only did they cut before us, not only did they step over our feet, not only did they pull my hair, now they also push us out of our queue,” she says.
The video was originally posted on Phichitamphon’s page. It has since been taken down, but versions of the video with English and Mandarin subtitles have been uploaded to Facebook and YouTube with more than two million hits. WARNING: OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE
“I can’t stand this”, “Chinese people unbelievable”, “Didn’t their parents teach them manners?” she says.
Phichitamphon also accuses the Chinese tourists of leaving the airport bathrooms in a disgraceful state.
“And let me say the restroom at the airport in Korea ... if you didn’t bring your own tissues ... allow me to say it’s so dirty.”
However the rant has been criticised by many as racist and prejudiced, stereotyping all Chinese tourists as behaving badly.
“This video is so absolutely disgusting!! For this lady to openly promote racism and to also be extremely rude to the people in the video and for herself, to also push across the crowd with a SELFIE stick while recording — absolutely offensive and hypocritical. No subtlety in shots fired towards China and Korea,” wrote Rawrrrr80 on YouTube.
“Please do not GENERALISE. These are Mainland Chinese, you don’t see overseas Chinese from Singapore Malaysia HongKong or Taiwan acting like this. Give CHINA time, she is still growing,” wrote joko ko1.
“How could people be this closed minded, I have been travelled to many countries and met bunch of people with different backgrounds. There were definitely good and bad people among all of em and its nothing with nationality. Those people in the video may be rude but they are not representative, millions of chinese people around the world are doing the right thing while not getting recognized while those people are the one destroying the image of Chinese. I have seen bunch of Americans spitting and talking loud when I was in India, so are all the Americans rude and being stupid. They are but not all Americans,” wrote Anthony Chen.
Cashed up Chinese tourists have been taking the world by storm, with governments relaxing visa requirements in a bid to attract their lucrative dollars. More than 100 million Chinese tourists went overseas last year.
But the influx of tourists has also landed them in hot water, with accusations of poor manners and a lack of cultural understanding. The Chinese government has launched initiatives to ensure Chinese tourists are better behaved overseas after a series of incidents made global headlines.
A Chinese teenager caused a furore after vandalising a 3500 year old Luxor Temple in Egypt by carving his name into it, and an unruly Chinese passenger on an AirAsia flight led the Chinese state media to condemn their citizens, saying they “behaved like barbarians.”
Earlier this year, state media in China reported that the National Tourism Administration will now keep records of problematic tourists and the head of the country’s tourism body, Li Jinzao, announced a new tactic to publicly shame those who engage in conduct unbecoming of the People’s Republic.