Chinese tourists will come of age

The May Day holiday will see many Chinese mainland residents, bitten by the travel bug, spending time away from home. While most of them will travel within the mainland, a large number will head overseas. We can thus expect yet another slew of micro-blogging reports on Chinese tourists behaving badly outside the mainland.

Recent additions to the mainland outbound tourist behavior "hall of shame" include faking marriage certificates to get honeymoon discounts in the Maldives, letting children defecate on the floor of a Taiwan airport, and throwing candies at tiny tots in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

These conducts reflect the explosive growth in Chinese outbound travel in recent years. Some 98 million Chinese tourists traveled abroad last year, up 14 million from 2012 and well above the 29 million who traveled abroad in 2004. It's highly likely that the majority of these people had not been abroad before.