OPINION:
In times more innocent than these, Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer wrote a best-seller, “The Ugly American,” circa 1958, about a well-meaning American bureaucrat who set out to repeat the success of the Marshall Plan in what were accurately called, with no intention of hurting anyone’s feelings, “the undeveloped countries.” Good intentions were not enough. The new plan didn’t work, foiled by hubris and pretension in the new class of American bureaucrats. The unattractive hero understood, but couldn’t turn the tide. He was dismissed as “the Ugly American” of his book.
His superficial characteristics, with less than glamorous personal appearance, were transferred to his opponents, and “the ugly American” became the name for those in the growing horde of American tourists who invaded the world with a peculiar bumptiousness that flouted all the local conventions and traditions.
With their mighty greenback dollars, the American tourist smoothed a few ruffled edges and the foreigners learned to live with the new pest, just as in later years they would learn to live with obnoxious and newly enriched German visitors. The dollar, and the mark, ruble, drachma and the whatever, do that. So it was inevitable that as China began to exercise its new economic muscle, Chinese tourists — armed with their millions, $117 million last year - became the world’s big spenders, called “the Ugly Chinese.”
Aggressive shopping for tax-free imports in Hong Kong rubbed the local Cantonese the wrong way, and a habit of clearing the throat to spit in public places, or in a Japanese-style hotel room in Tokyo, became cliches. Anyone who has gone to the movies in Hong Kong recalls the loud honking, hocking and spitting that sometimes threatened to drown the movie’s sound track.
This has attracted the attention of President Xi Jinping and the Chinese government. On a visit to the Maldives, Mr. Xi warned his countrymen that “[we] should be civilized when traveling abroad. “Don’t throw empty mineral water bottles in the coral, please.” More serious affronts have been chronicled: Hair-pulling fights over how to recline a seat aboard an airliner, arguments over paying for hot water for noodles brought along in a shopping bag, attempts to open an airliner door in flight to let in a little fresh air, and teenage graffiti scrawled on national monuments.
The Beijing government is trying to learn how to use “soft power,” like spending billions to establish China studies departments in foreign universities (and perhaps to do a little spying on the side), all to avoid riling the natives. To crack down on miscreants and the ill-mannered, Beijing now requires a certain quota of “civilized” travelers to accompany groups of loud Chinese travelers. But “the Ugly Chinese,” like the Ugly Americans before them, are likely to be a permanent fixture on the landscape.
Tourists everywhere, loud or not, spend money. “A tourist is worth a bale of cotton,” a famous Southern governor once remarked, “and he’s a lot easier to pick.”
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