The tourism authorities in Beijing said that they are considering in creating a blacklist of “uncivilized visitors” in order to limit the bad behavior by visitors, as this busy city in China is flooded with tourists for Tomb Sweeping Festival or Qingming Festival.
According to the state media, the officials at the Beijing Municipal Administration Center of Parks said that the rise in domestic tourists visiting the Chinese capital for the three-day holiday, also known as Qingming Festival, had coincided with “uncivilized tourist behaviour,” including climbing peach trees, picking flowers, damaging plants, fishing in park lakes, and selling things illegally within the city’s parks.
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.
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. Those needing paper had to make eye contact with a machine before it spit out a single portion — anyone needing more than the provided amount would need to wait 9 minutes.
This time Chinese tourists made more than 112 million domestic trips during Tomb Sweeping Festival, a is a 10.9% 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. Policing of tourists has been ramping up in recent years. In 2016, the China National Tourism Administration placed 20 people with a history of bad behavior 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 offenses which landed people on the list included travel misbehavior such as disrupting flights or smoking on trains, it also includes those who have failed to pay court judgments or taking part in illegal securities trading. The people on the list can be banned from some or all air and train travel for up to 12 months.
Such blacklists are seen as a precursor to a proposed countrywide “social credit system,” which would be used to monitor and police a huge range of behaviour. The people with poor social credit scores could be prevented from travelling, struggle to apply for loans, or banned from taking part in some businesses.
