Citizen complaint of the day: People are eating the shrubs in the Public Garden

Everybody's familiar with the "Ugly American" stereotype of American's traveling abroad and behaving like a bunch of oafs because they're not cognizant/respectful of cultural differences. Personally, I get embarrassed when I've been overseas and I see Americans who have made no attempt whatsoever to learn the local language or customs. I'm willing to bet that most of us on this thread feel the same way.

So when somebody visits the U.S. and pays no attention to our standards, how would that be any different? It seems like there would be three possible rationales for not taking issue with visitors disregarding our cultural norms:

1. A person thinks we don't actually have a culture per se;
2. A person thinks we have a culture but that it's somehow not worth as much as other cultures, i.e. ones American travelers might visit; or
3. A person thinks American culture is so globally dominant ("the hamburger that ate the world") that, as a general principle, it doesn't need defending.

Rationales 1 and 2 are oddly self-effacing. Rationale 3 makes sense but only if you assume that American culture is/will remain a sort of global default which, given the rise of other global powers, maybe ought to be reexamined at some point.

Simply put, I don't expect any less of visitors from abroad than I'd expect of U.S. citizens when we go abroad. Holding visitors from overseas to a lower standard carries a whiff of "how could they possibly know any better?," which is problematic for all sorts of reasons.

I'm fully aware of the reputation that Chinese tourists have earned. (Aside: there's nothing especially Chinese about bad behavior; we have plenty of homegrown litter-tossing, road-raging, resource-hoarding "sociopath-lite" jackasses of our own.)

Where we appear to disagree is that you argue that it's a matter of different cultures having different rules and expectations; that it's a matter of them not knowing our rules. I think most of the behavior that people complain about is just as much against the rules at home in China as it is abroad; that the issue is not lack of awareness of the rules so much as it is not giving a damn about the rules.

I think this is for two reasons, mostly:

1. One-child policy. The largest social engineering experiment in the history of humankind. An entire couple of generations growing up without siblings. See Little Emperor Syndrome
2. A society in which power and privilege are highly stratified. Chinese who are in a position to travel abroad are either party elites, children of party elites, or rich. These are folks who have spent their entire lives being taught by their society at home that the rules are for little people and don't apply to them. They have learned that for them, there are absolutely no consequences for misbehavior.