文明出游 (wen ming chu you):Civilized Travelling

As Chinese tourists swarmed to tourist destinations during the National Day holiday bad manners appeared in public. In Tian'anmen Square, street cleaners collected 3.5 tons of trash after the flag-raising ceremony on the first day of the holiday. In an exhibition house in Shenzhen of Guangdong province, almost all of the 50,000 decorative porcelain dolls were taken away by tourists.

China has entered the era of mass tourism where traveling has become a common choice during long holidays. According to a prediction by the China Tourism Academy, the number of domestic tourists during this year's seven-day National Day holiday was around 480 million, a 13 percent increase from the same time last year.

Yet the awareness of proper manners has not grown as fast as the number of tourists. Instilling good manners in people requires the efforts of various walks of life, such as schools, families, a moral evaluation mechanism, and media supervision. A lot of the photos of tourists displaying bad manners have been posted on the Internet, which may serve as deterrent to others. Also, Fujian province announced at the beginning of this year that it will reveal the names of the tourists who commit serious offences in the code of conduct covering its tourist destinations.

However, at the same time infrastructure in tourist destinations needs to be improved to accommodate the sudden surge of tourists during the holidays. Many places do not have enough trash cans, bathrooms or restaurants. Once one person starts littering, others will follow suit. Managers of the tourist destinations should also think of creative means to change tourists' behavior. For instance, Chinese people love inscribing their names at places to show they have been there. Perhaps a graffiti wall can be built to channel these yearning to leave their mark.