Just last year, both online and print media have been fussing over the fact that “The Chinese are coming!”
I remember China Daily publishing an informative piece about The Chinese Wave. Some excerpts are as follows:
Twenty years ago, it was a dream for most Chinese. China’s first approved foreign tourist destination for Chinese travelers was Thailand in 1988. In November of 1988, travel agencies in Guangzhou, capital of South China’s Guangdong province, started to organize Chinese travelers to visit Thailand. Before that, beginning in 1983, mainland residents could only tour Hong Kong and Macao.
For a whole generation of Chinese who still had vivid memories of how people with overseas relatives or connections were investigated and persecuted during the “cultural revolution” (1966-76), going abroad seemed to be out of question.
Taiwan Today gave out a different picture. The statistics are turning tables now. Blame it on the A(H1N1).
A sense of shock has overtaken travel agents and hotel operators, who had expected endless business opportunities to accompany the arrival of mainland tourists. Instead business has plunged by 70 percent.
Oh well. Business also has its ups and downs. But something is consistent even through the surging and dwindling of tourist numbers.
It is that there is a similar image pointing to the Chinese tourist.
I always enjoy going back to this UC Berkeley student’s account of Mainland tourists in a restaurant in Taiwan. It is a picture common among locals witnessing the great Chinese wave.
I will be quoting her post as a whole, so please do check out her blog afterwards.
She arrived on a whim. A. is the first friend to visit me in Taipei who actually speaks and reads Chinese, so meeting up was a simple matter of instructing her on which shuttle bus to ride and which stop to disembark. She came on the same day as the first official batch of tourists arriving on direct flights from China, a news item that has kept the media buzzing for a while.
First night’s dinner was at my favorite shabu shabu restaurant. It was good to see business hopping as usual. At some point, an extra rowdy crowd entered and claimed over half of the first floor. Unfamiliar accents and vocal registers pricked through the low buzz of collective dinner conversations, which puttered out into silence when one man stood up to the buffet line and started bellowing instructions to the half of the room that had just arrived.
Such silence, the sound of realization — Oh. They’re here.
The man ended his speech (I’m not even sure what dialect he was speaking) with a shrill “LAOBAN! LAOBAN!” calling the store manager over to where he stood. If nothing else, that action would’ve been a dead giveaway that this crowd wasn’t from around these parts. “What do you do if you’re trying to get the manager’s attention?” asked A., earnestly.
“You go find him,” I said. Most Taiwanese people just don’t stand in the middle of a restaurant and hail the manager over on account of the sheer volume of their voice. And actually, for all I know, maybe most Chinese people don’t either.
S’gonna be an interesting summer…
The Taiwanese have always been curious of the Chinese and vice versa. Considering they are similar in a lot of ways and are simply different in social experiences, this curiosity just rings the bell.
I suspect the reaction in Taiwan will become the same as it has in many businesses in Thailand, Korea and Malaysia, from hotels and restaurants to hostess bars: First warm to the swarm’s increase in business, then put off by the amount of noise and petty trouble the swarm makes from check-in to check-out, finally cold refusal to put up with anymore.
Woah. I do hope it does not get to the “cold refusal” stage. Though the account may seem discriminatory, it actually just points out to the differences in culture. Like in a venue such as a small restaurant, one can obviously point out how the Chinese are different.
And in the author’s words, it’s like a confrontation.
A joke making the rounds in Singapore where the government favours mainland Chinese immigration:
Four women are being ferried across when a sudden squall threatens the small boat. The owner tells the women to throw things overboard or they’ll be swamped.
The American girl throws all her gold jewelry over the side saying, “In America we’ve got lots of gold, I can always get more”.
The Japanese girl throws all her electronic gear over the side saying, “In Japan we’ve got lots of electronic stuff, I can always get more.”
The Singaporean girl frets, “We don’t have lots of anything in Singapore… Ah! I know….” and throws the mainland Chinese girl over the side.
Haha. That’s a good one. :-P
Anything new causes some resistances I guess. What’s more important is how people cope with it.
I remember some years ago, in a group emails to all faculty and staff members, a professor complained loudly about the “disgusting” smell of food coming from the department’s communal kitchen. We just had a research staff of Afghanistan origin joining us so we all know who the email was targeting. The email went like “…scent of fresh brewed coffee is OK, but are we running the risk of turning away potential collaborators by giving them the impression that we work for a takeaway parlour?” That professor joined the faculty 10 years before from Bulgaria. Not sure if his suits and ties ever got any comments like that but he apparently only wear Marks & Spencer stuff ever since.
You’re right. I think this newness will eventually die down in the not so near future. Right now, there’s still the “Hey, they’re China guys, etc.”
I want to know how they respond when they see the flag of the Republic of China flying proudly atop the mast.
Interesting question. You do mean Taiwan (ROC), right? I would think it’s more of a nonchalant reaction. The stereotyping looks one way. Or in this case, because the Chinese (people from China) are the minority in Taiwan. The minorities are the ones who are always different and gets noticed.
Like when I was in high school, we had a few Taiwanese classmates. We do talk about them; because they like bundling together.
stuart is just trying to pick a fight. The vast majority of mainland Chinese tourists who visit Taiwan don’t get their neiku in a twist seeing the ROC flag in the ROC. They inherently understand the situation and, unlike stuart, don’t visit Taiwan with a political chip on their shoulder. If anything, the Taiwanese pan-Greens tend to have a bigger beef with the ROC flag than the mainland Chinese tourists.
Picking a fight? I think not. Surely many mainland tourists, based on the rhetoric and information available to them, cannot possibly “understand the situation” with any degree of nuance or tolerance. And I doubt they would make their true feelings known. Rather, their twisted sinews would be suppressed through lack of overwhelming numbers.
Students aren’t always the best guide, but the general feeling when I was teaching at universities in China was that the Taiwanese should be punished for any demonstration of their defacto independence. They literally couldn’t stomach the idea of such a wicked act of defiance as flying the ROC flag.
Did you ever observe the interaction (or lack of) between mainland and Taiwanese students when you were in the States? Let’s imagine the Taiwanese students organised a celebration of Taiwanese culture and bedecked their exhibition with ROC flags. How would mainland Chinese students respond? With curiosity? With understanding? Or with a slightly tweaked neiku involving aggressive counter-displays and red flags?
But send those same students to Taiwan and their outrage is likely to be muted.
stuart, you’re being immature in how you set out to badmouth “Chinese tourists” based upon a negative preconception and generalization you have of Chinese people as a whole, rather any empirical experience you have with mainland tourists to Taiwan. This is “picking a fight.” You set out to suggest and accuse Chinese tourists as people who “cannot possibly ‘understand the situation’ with any degree of nuance or tolerance.” That’s incredibly bigoted and dogmatically indefensible of you. In fact, that you’d go out on a limb to insist that many mainland tourists cannot understand any degree of nuance or tolerance just shows how YOU cannot possibly understand the situation with any degree of nuance or tolerance.
We’re talking about mainland Chinese tourists to Taiwan, not nationalistic fenqing students. Taking the latter as a proxy for the former is clearly inappropriate, by your own admission. So stop. They’re different demographics and psychographics. You wouldn’t use university student attitudes as representative of migrant workers, so why would you substitute hypernationalistic, poor students who have never left their country to much older, moneyed tourists who have?
Believe it or not, stuart, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese students in America typically get along just fine. You’re taking the whole “overseas but still a raving patriot” caricature of Chinese study abroad students to extremes. I’d ask if you’ve actually been to university and interacted with Asian study abroad students from Taiwan and mainland China but I really don’t think I’d get an honest answer from you. I can tell you with complete certainty however that they’re not waging little proxy battles in America at every moment despite how many images have been seared into your mind from March-August last year.
Your ignorance and bigotry is offensive, stuart. I really wish you didn’t feel compelled to see anything involving the Chinese in such black and white terms. I wish you’d live up to the same understanding of nuance and tolerance you assail the Chinese for lacking.
So, the Taiwanese are now the cosmopolitan sophisticates rolling their eyes at the hick country cousins from across the straits. Sigh. I remember thinking about Taiwanese the same way when I was there as a student over 25 years ago. Tour groups from southern Taiwan visiting Taipei were loud, and there were lots of betelnut spit stains everywhere. I also remember seeing brochures at the Taipei airport departure section admonishing Taiwan tourists how to behave when they go overseas — not to shout or spit — so as not to arouse negative attention from foreigners. These days on the mainland, you can see similar brochures at Beijing and Shanghai airports. Plus ca change!
What these commentators are pointing out is nothing new. It is not so much “cultural differences” as it is a question of sophistication versus lack of sophistication. China’s rising middle class population (the ones who can afford international travel) is taking advantage of newfound freedom and surplus income to travel outside the mainland for the first time. Of course they will seem awkward and commit all kinds of unacceptable faux pas!
My favorite part of the 90′s movie Tian mi mi (Comrades, Almost a Love Story) was the realization that Maggie Cheung’s character was also a mainlander trying to pretend she was from Hong Kong. Isn’t it often the case that those who aspire to higher social status will despise and ridicule most those who remind them of what they used to be and are trying to get away from? And yet when they scratch beneath the surface and spend time together, the differences seem to fade away and people find ways to connect.
This is an old story, not unique to China/Taiwan.
“Our American Cousin”, the play that US President Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated in 1865, was about a wealthy but uncouth and unsophisticated country bumpkin from America visiting his more refined cousins in England. Humor ensues. He introduces himself as “the loudest critter” in his home state of Vermont. He complains to his dinner hosts that when no “brandy, rum, gin and whiskey,” is served. His hosts are “alternately horrified and amused by their bumpkin cousin.” He repeatedly shows his ignorance about such refinements as how to use a shower. See http://www.slate.com/id/2211071/ This is the middle of the nineteenth century when England was the most economically advanced nation in the world and the U.S. was merely a developing country.
The harder challenge is how to look past all the outside differences in manners, sophistication, etiquette and behavior and see the common human underneath.
In Sidetracked’s blog comments, she mentions that the interaction showed “how something seemingly so small as restaurant etiquette can reveal the extent of the cultural gulf that has emerged over the years without direct communication. As if you took two siblings and raised them in separate homes — ignoring the specificities of the whole nature vs. nurture debate, you would expect the two to have very different personalities, given their home environment.” (http://woquinoncoin.livejournal.com/136094.html)
I would agree, but I would also chalk up a lot of the current “cultural” differences to their experiences of profoundly different levels of economic development over the past 50 years. As the two sides become more economically similar, the differences will continue to diminish. Focusing on these kinds of differences as referring to “how the Chinese are different” is superficial at best.
The more interesting interaction to pay attention to is what happens when people get past the initial (negative) first impressions, and how they manage to overcome these differences.
There were profound differences between waishengren and benshengren in the 1950′s and 1960′s, but somehow many of these folks wound up intermarrying and raising families, and now these differences make for nostalgic dinner conversation and personal reflections on identity by their children. Amor omnia vincit (Love conquers all!)
Great comment! It should be a blog post! Want to write for us? LoL!
OMG! Maggie Cheung! :-)
Anyway, good point about the economic and financial status. Though one’s faux pas may not be faux pas to the other. Even if the two sides will become more economically similar in the near future, I still think the same differences will still be present. But then people won’t notice them as much, because it’s like passe already.
Thanks for the comment!
stuart, you’re being immature in how you set out to badmouth “Chinese tourists”
Grow up, Kai – that’s about one generation removed from “why do you hate China” as a response to my dislike for certain Chinese dishes.
…based upon a negative preconception and generalization you have of Chinese people as a whole
Nope; it just suits your purpose to convince yourself that this is true.
You set out to suggest and accuse Chinese tourists as people who “cannot possibly ‘understand the situation’ with any degree of nuance or tolerance.”
I also began that sentence with “Surely”, which qualifies it rather, don’t you think? But it’s certainly closer to the truth than your opposing inference that mainland tourists are capable of viewing the Taiwan issue objectively.
…not nationalistic fenqing students.
How did the fenqing get into this?
Taking the latter as a proxy for the former is clearly inappropriate
If by ‘latter’ you refer to students generally rather than those of a fenqing variety, then yes. But if you read my reply properly you will see that I clearly didn’t do this.
They’re different demographics and psychographics.
Exactly. So what precisely is tweaking your neurology here?
…so why would you substitute hypernationalistic, poor students who have never left their country to much older, moneyed tourists who have?
Wow! That’s reading between the lines on acid!
Believe it or not, stuart, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese students in America typically get along just fine.
If that was your experience, then of course I believe you.
You’re taking the whole “overseas but still a raving patriot” caricature of Chinese study abroad students to extremes.
NO. I’m saying that based on my experience, and that of other educators, Taiwanese and mainland students keep each other at a respectable distance because they find it impossible to reconcile their respective politics.
I’d ask if you’ve actually been to university and interacted with Asian study abroad students from Taiwan and mainland China but I really don’t think I’d get an honest answer from you.
Seeing as you’re not asking I’ll refrain from telling you that I have, both in the UK and Australia.
I can tell you with complete certainty however that they’re not waging little proxy battles in America
OK
…despite how many images have been seared into your mind from March-August last year.
What happened last year?
Your ignorance and bigotry is offensive, stuart.
No. Your attempt to characterize me in this way offends your own intellect, and there’s not much I can do about that.
I really wish you didn’t feel compelled to see anything involving the Chinese in such black and white terms.
We’ve agreed before that mastering objectivity is a tough nut to crack. If you always read my replies through a black and white lens, then that’s how you’re going to see them.
Mainland tourists on their way to Taiwan don’t get handed leaflets entitled “Important information: ‘One China’ is not really the will of all Chinese people” or “The historical arguments for Taipei as China’s political centre”.
Do they?
stuart, see previous reply.
Very informative and entertaining! I visited China in 96, TW in 98 and 2001. Liked both places, had no qualms about seeing the ROC flag, nor do any mainland family members that I know of has expressed such a sentiment. If anything, the talk seem to be a third united front between PRC and PROC to fight the Green party.
A side note, Stuart and Kai, you two seem to be quite intelligent and articulte. Can two smart ppl just agree to disagree? After reading the comments back and forth, I somtimes have to scroll back up to remember what the original post was about :)
Babygrand – I’m pleased to hear that you’ve encountered no issues with the ROC flag among mainland vistors. Nor should there be, but it’s not always the case:
http://tinyurl.com/ROCflag
As for the ‘third united front’ you mention, the non-green Taiwanese should be more careful about who they climb into bed with.
I wonder if stuart ever read the link he provided. There’s nothing in the report saying the Tianjin University students objected the flag. On the contrary, it’s the host organization that took the flag out, then the Taiwanese started bickering among themselves. How come this is an issue for the visiting mainlanders? I don’t understand.
I tend to think the more appropriate question to ask should be, would some people currently living in Taiwan be self-confident enough not having to resort to displaying the flag (proudly?) to show they exist.
Actually using that flag to pick a fight is wacky already. I know for a fact it’s those green supporters who have the most problems with the flag because it’s to similar to KMT’s party flag， e.g., http://www.libertytimes.com.tw/2009/new/jun/12/today-p1.htm
They want to trash the flag in the first place, but suddenly turned pro-flag when the time is right. It’s just so funny.
On the other hand, it’s not like the mainlanders have never seen the KMT flags. Two examples here:
http://www.1911museum.com/ in Wuhan
http://place.ytrip.com/photo/46845/ in Nanjing
Well, I find the reaction funny.
There was no conspiracy involved and the students are just starting issues. At least from my perspective.
But of course, it is the Taipei Times after all. The article may be trying to insinuate something that’s really not there. Everyone’s trying to politicize anything concerning China and Taiwan.
Babygrand, lol, don’t worry about stuart and I. We have a little history of disagreeing vehemently on CNR. If you’ve read our arguments from the beginning, you might better understand it, but I wouldn’t wish that on you. :) Cheers for the great comment, and thank you for reaffirming the fact that there are plenty of mainlanders who can indeed see nuance in the entire China-Taiwan issue.
Haha. With regards to Kai and Stuart’s backlashing and choice of words, I would definitely say so.
Thanks for your visit and insights! :-)
All I can remember is: Male Chinese tourists often dress in coats. I find it too formal…
Hmm… I have a feeling that this is the case right now only because they encounter mostly the older mainlander. Later on, when this becomes more common, the influx of the younger version, the more cosmopolitan among them so to speak, sophistication will follow.
There are rude and nice in every race.
If you don’t like a particular race you will BS it. It’s human nature.
Just remember what you see other race will reflect what other race will see you.
Hard conclusion, yet we should take note of that.
Interesting to see though how many have similar views with regards to the older Mainlanders.
But I guess it’s always an over simplication of things. Culture and traits otherwise.
There are so many Taiwanese businesses and people on the Mainland now that I am surprised that any Taiwanese would be able to even *feign* shock at the presence of Mainlanders in Taiwan. The strait flows both ways.
I dislke mainlander manners very poor
Mainland Chinese, no matter they travel in Taiwan or Malaysia or Singapore or Thailand or the USA, remain stupid (i.e. insensitive, unaware) to their conduct and attitudes upon others, despite the apologists here. Overseas some hotels and restaurants have been known to reserve sections or distant floors for mainland Chinese who think it a privilege and evidence of respect, not understanding it is segregation. Some places refuse mainland Chinese tour groups.
A mainland Chinese enters a hotel buffet, loads up his plate to the very edge, takes the nearest seat and gobbles it all down as his eyes dart here and there, looking for other mainlanders. Add two more and you’ve got a din; add two more to that and people begin to leave in droves as the mainlanders clap hands loudly and bellow “Eh! Eh!” for service.
And they remain stupid to the effect they have on others, which is not resentment, just a feeling of “we can’t take it any more”.
Does this seem hard to believe? Perhaps a rant? Well, ask a native Singaporean or Malysian Chinese. Ask front desk workers in Bangkok. Ask Taiwanese. Or look to the mainland Chinese when checking in a hotel, or entering a restaurant overseas, or in any group overseas.