Beijing mulls blacklisting 'uncivilised visitors'

Tourism authorities in Beijing said they were considering creating a blacklist of "uncivilised visitors" in order to curb bad behaviour, as the Chinese capital was inundated with tourists for the Tomb Sweeping Festival, the media reported on Monday.

According to reports, officials at the Beijing Municipal Administration Centre of Parks said that the upsurge in domestic tourists visiting the city for the three-day holiday, also known as Qingming Festival, had coincided with "uncivilised tourist behaviour", including climbing peach trees, picking flowers, damaging plants, fishing in park lakes and selling things illegally within the city's parks, CNN reported.

During the festival, Chinese families visit the tombs of their ancestors to clean the gravesites, pray and make ritual offerings.

A blacklist would block "loutish travellers" from visiting the city's parks, using facial recognition software and other surveillance technology to monitor guests and keep out those with a record of bad behaviour.

Chinese tourists made more than 112 million domestic trips during this year's Tomb Sweeping Festival, a 10.9 per cent increase on last year, according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Beijing alone saw more than 700,000 people visiting some dozen parks around the city.

In a similar move in 2017, Beijing's Temple of Heaven Park installed face scanners in its toilets to prevent what officials said was an epidemic of toilet paper theft, CNN reported.

Those needing paper had to make eye contact with a machine before it gave out a single portion -- anyone needing more than the provided amount would need to wait nine minutes.

In 2016, the China National Tourism Administration placed 20 people with a history of bad behaviour on a blacklist, restricting their ability to travel.

Last year, the travel blacklist was expanded to include more than 670 people.

While some of the offences which landed people on the list included travel misbehaviour such as disrupting flights or smoking on trains, it also had those who have failed to pay court judgments or taking part in illegal securities trading.

--IANS

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