Reports of Chinese tourists letting their toddlers urinate in public in Taipei have set off fresh debate about the manners of mainland visitors and whether they’re being unfairly stigmatized.
Parents allowing their children to relieve themselves over trash cans, pieces of paper or sometimes just the sidewalk are not uncommon sights on the mainland. But mainland parents permitting similar behavior while visiting Hong Kong or Taiwan have triggered a backlash among locals who see it as evidence of the harmful influence of huge numbers of Chinese tourists on their quality of life.
On Sunday, the Taiwan-based Apple Daily reported that a mainland family had allowed their 3-year-old boy to urinate into a bottle at one of Taipei’s best-known restaurants, the Din Tai Fung outlet in the Taipei 101 skyscraper, on Oct. 2. The bottle then splashed on their table, and Apple Daily’s report on the ensuing mess — and the family’s subsequent demand that the restaurant replace their food — raised complaints in Taiwan about the behavior of mainland visitors.
A day later, the paper reported on a separate incident at Taipei 101, which was captured in photos that circulated widely online. After seeing that report, the mother contacted local news media to say that she was a Taipei resident, not a Chinese tourist, and that her child didn’t urinate at the table. She said he had been splashed with water and she was drying him off. The Apple Daily retracted its report on the second incident and apologized to the mother.
But the newspaper stands by its story about the Oct. 2 incident, said Mark Simon, an executive with Apple Daily’s parent company, Next Media. “The first story at Din Tai Fung is true,” Mr. Simon said. “There were witnesses and everything.”
Chinese news outlets jumped on Apple Daily’s correction of its second story to complain about what they characterized as bias against mainland tourists.
“From this incident we can see the pride and prejudice of some media and members of the public in Taiwan, and the feelings of inferiority and self-abasement among some media and members of the public in the mainland,” read one column carried by the website of the Guangming Daily newspaper.
Many Chinese say they believe that the overall behavior of tourists going abroad has improved, and some doubted the veracity of the first reported incident at Din Tai Fung.
“The Taiwanese media should also apologize to mainland tourists,” wrote one Beijing resident on the Sina Weibo microblog service.
“Have mainlanders been made a scapegoat? Have the Taiwanese media messed up?” read a post at Study Xi’s Fan Club, a Sina Weibo account that closely follows Chinese President Xi Jinping and that some analysts speculate is an officially sanctioned propaganda voice.
The debate over the events in Taipei follows a similar uproar in Hong Kong, where in April a mainland couple who allowed their child to urinate on a street in the Mong Kok district confronted passers-by who complained, including a man who videotaped the scene. That dispute triggered complaints from Hong Kong residents who feel that the huge numbers of mainland visitors are crowding the semiautonomous Chinese territory’s already limited space, driving up prices and forcing out neighborhood shops and restaurants to make way for upscale jewelry stores and pharmacies catering to Chinese tourists.
This year the city of 7.2 million people is expected to receive about 45 million visits from the mainland. While the recent protests in Hong Kong have focused on winning freer elections for the city’s top political leader in 2017, many demonstrators have raised complaints about the broader influence of the mainland on the city’s identity, culture and daily life as well.
Taiwan, a de facto independent state that China claims as its territory, has also seen rising numbers of mainland visitors as President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan has pushed to increase trade and other exchanges with China. Last year nearly 3 million Chinese tourists visited Taiwan.
But Taiwan is much larger than Hong Kong, and the number of mainland tourists much smaller, so their presence hasn’t produced the same level of animosity as in Hong Kong. In May, Taiwan raised the number of individual Chinese tourists who can arrive each day from 3,000 to 4,000. But the Taiwan minister of transportation and communications, Yeh Kuang-shih, did not approve a request from airlines to further increase the daily quota of mainland Chinese traveling in tour groups from 5,000 to 10,000, citing “a bit of turmoil” associated with the rising number of Chinese visitors.