There seems to be an agreement around the world; that mainland Chinese tourists are the worst. They do rude things, cut in lines, pay no respect to locals, throw trash on the ground, and behave in a most uncivil and immoral way.
These types of bad behaviors by mainland Chinese tourists are unfortunately reported all over the world; from France, to the United States, to Argentina, and even to the African continent. If this is true, then what is the cause of this terrible reputation that mainland Chinese tourists have? Did they always behave this way?
Some people point to the fact that there is a doctrine of struggle being followed by the people of communist China; indeed, that communist societies themselves are morally reprehensible when put into practice. The people produced by societies like communist China, tend to think that when they visit foreign countries, the local people are naive and can be easily taken advantage of.
This issue has become so pronounced that even foreign exchange students from mainland China now have a terrible reputation. Anecdotal stories, for instance, of Chinese foreign exchange students stealing technology and information from their universities have become commonplace in the United States. Lucrative rewards await these students in mainland China when they bring back foreign technologies and information to their government.
Perhaps an even more nefarious example, depending on your moral beliefs, are the stories of exchange students feinting love in order to acquire green cards of residency in the United States, and then immediately divorcing once the paperwork has been made official.
Are they desperate to escape? Is no means too low to justify the ends? When one looks back on the history of the Chinese exchange student, it begs the question: Whatever happened to Virtuous Chinese Exchange student?
For example, in 1908 the US congress passed a bill enabling a scholarship program to be created specifically for foreign Chinese students to be educated in the United States. It was called the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program.
Excess funds were paid by China as reparations for American losses incurred during the Boxer Uprising in Beijing in 1900. Then US president Roosevelt claimed, it was also a cultural investment for bridging China with the U.S and a way to peacefully control China’s reform and development.
From 1909 to 1929, the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program sent around 1,300 Chinese students to study in the U.S. Drawing candidates from all across China, the examination process for this prestigious scholarship was highly competitive: with 630 candidates in 1937, for example, only 47 were selected.
It was a highly successful program for its time, and a number of prominent Chinese Americans were cultivated by the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, including: MIT’s first Chinese architect Kwan Sung-Sing, philosopher Hu Shih, nobel physics prize winner Yang Chen-Ning, electrical engineer Lee Yuk-Wing, mathematician Chung Kai-Lai, linguist Chao Yuen Ren, educator Kuo Ping-Wen, rocket scientist Tsien HsueShen, meteorologist and scholar Chu Coching and architectural engineer Edward Y. Ying, who was influential In the planning of modern Shanghai.
A total of five groups of scholars were educated in the U.S. before the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, and in the aftermath of WWII, the communist revolution took place. 5,000 years of Chinese culture and traditional values were forever altered.
As the Chinese generations have progressed since this time, it can be clearly seen through the prism of history what has been done; a highly moral, skilled, and brilliant people, have had their gifts turned towards depravity and nefarious means by removing their ancient moral foundations.
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