Illustration: Lu Ting/GT

When speaking of China, what pops first into your mind? Tea, kung fu, pandas? But as more Chinese travel abroad, "badly behaved tourists" are now most commonly associated by Westerners with their image of China, overshadowing 5,000 years of glorious history and culture.



Last year alone, over 120 million Chinese ventured abroad, breaking records for both the number of visitors and their buying power. Among them, the occasional bad apple made international headlines.



Stories about Chinese airplane passengers opening emergency exit doors, fist-fighting with stewardesses, pooping on historical landmarks, carving their name into ancient walls, and devouring buffets like locusts are all now cliché, as they have occurred more than once.



But we Chinese are not the only ones guilty of uncivilized behavior. Foreign tourists to China are just as likely to do something stupid.



Most recently NBA Houston Rockets player Bobby Brown wrote his name and uniform number on a section of China's Great Wall. Photos of his graffiti went viral on Chinese social media, provoking outrage among concerned netizens who criticized Brown for not just defacing our most famous heritage site but also the fact that he was allowed to get away with it.



Western media seem obsessed with any story that portrays Chinese tourists in a negative light, consistently assigning coverage about embarrassing Chinese travelers. Yet where were the headlines about the Bobby Brown incident?



The propensity and tendency for Chinese travelers to join large tour groups, which can create a "herd mentality" that results in a number of people all acting stupidly, is not well regarded by Westerners, who prefer to travel independently and comparatively quietly.



But this doesn't mean foreign tourists behave any better than their Chinese counterparts; it just means that, compared with the large number of Chinese, there are far less foreigners abroad and thus statistically less likely of them causing a scene.



Rena, a Chinese who works for an international tourism company that operates in China, recently shared on douban.com stories of her Western clients who act as ridiculously and unreasonably as Chinese tourists are accused of.



Recently, Rena had to deal with a foreign tourist dining at a Chinese restaurant who, after instructing a local waiter to open a 188 yuan ($27.96) bottle of wine, refused to pay for the bottle because he said "in my country we only have to pay by the glass."



Rena also has to deal with tour groups who make unreasonable complaints, like a recent group who whined that "all the buildings in the Forbidden City look the same" and demanded their tour end early.



Expat weblog thenanfang.com recently reported on a foreign mother who put her two children on top of a 600-year-old statue at the Ming Tombs in Nanjing just to take photos.



This is the same site that first reported on those expats in Shenzhen whose big summer drug party had been busted by police. So while it's nice to see some foreign sources embarrassing their own, such incidences are still not likely to get picked up by major newswires, who prefer to ridicule Chinese tourists.



Occasionally, Westerners traveling abroad will get their name in the news if they do something really scandalous, like all those European pedophiles in Southeast Asia or Aussie drug traffickers operating in Oceania.



But not even those perpetrators' home countries have ever been wholly banned for their reprehensible behavior; meanwhile, the Chinese have been blacklisted from multiple tourists attractions abroad just for doing something innocently dumb.



A restaurant in Vietnam, for example, reportedly refused to provide service to any Chinese visitors, hanging a notice on their door saying "not selling things to Chinese."



Truly, many Chinese have never before traveled abroad and may get a bit too overexcited or supercilious when they first arrive. But the same goes for Westerners, especially those new to China.



Lest we forget, "Rude Americans" was actually an international catchphrase in the 1980s. So if China can forgive Bobby Brown for his vandalism, surely his country can do the same for our occasional overseas missteps.



The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Global Times.