President Xi Jinping has appealed to Chinese tourists not to leave a bad reputation behind, and eat fewer cups of instant noodles while travelling abroad. "Do not litter water bottles everywhere. Do not damage coral reefs. Eat less instant noodles and more local seafood," the China News Service quoted Xi as saying in Maldives this week.
Xi is currently in India as part of his South Asia tour that has taken him to Maldives and Sri Lanka. The Maldives is among the 10 most popular overseas destinations for Chinese tourists, according to a tourist market survey.
Chinese tourists have been previously criticised for misbehaving while travelling abroad, including being noisy, jumping queues and damaging cultural relics. A former employee at a five-star hotel in the Maldives said online last year that the hotel had stopped the supply of hot water to rooms to prevent Chinese guests preparing instant noodles, Hong Kong based South China Morning Post reported.
The employee said that the hotel's general manager even joked that "CN", an abbreviation for China, meant "cup noodles" because many Chinese tourists stayed up in their room eating the cheap food to save money.
Xi said Chinese citizens made about 100 million trips overseas a year. Chinese travellers are expected to make about 400,000 trips to the Maldives this year. Xi also asked Chinese people living in the Maldives to create a good image for China and for Chinese contractors working there to build projects that would stand the test of time.
"Let's not do one-shot deals. We should leave a good reputation here," he said. China this week clinched the multi-million dollar deal to upgrade Male's international airport for which the Maldives had earlier contracted Indian firm GMR but unilaterally terminated the agreement in 2012.
According to the ChinaTourismAcademy, the number of Chinese travelling abroad rose 18 per cent last year compared with 2012. Of the 1.1 million foreign tourists visiting the Maldives last year, Chinese tourists accounted for about one-third.
