Maldives, Chinese and the fight for instant noodles

The Maldives have been in the news again, in China, following a post on Sina Weibo by a former Chinese employee of one of the resorts on the islands. The claim made was that the hotel removed hot water kettles from the rooms of Chinese guests while leaving them in the rooms of European guests, ostensibly because Chinese were cooking in their rooms.

The complaint received wide exposure on Chinese social media and calls for boycotting Maldives by Chinese tourists started to come up last week. Predictably, the hotel in question has disputed these claims by what they say is a disgruntled former employee. At the time of writing this, the real facts are not known – only that regardless of what the truth is, the image of the Maldives has been hit again, this time portrayed as insensitive to Chinese culture or even racist to Chinese people. Claims that the hotel has removed the kettles because they are losing money on food and drink due to the Chinese cooking their own instant noodles and other food in their rooms are also made.

This has opened a can worms of issues surrounding the effects of Chinese tourists on destinations around the world, and I will return to address these issues in another blog post. This time I want to focus on the Maldives as a luxury leisure and incentive destination for Chinese, and indeed for other nationalities.

At the end of 2011, the Muslim government in Maldives decreed that hotels can no longer offer Spa treatments as they were deemed indecent. This ban was overruled by the President since it would have affected tourism extremely negatively. Chinese do like their massages.

But the issue of food is bound to cause great offence to Chinese and understanding their culture means knowing how important food is to them. In places where the local cuisine uses spices and cooking methods alien to Chinese, they are bound to look for familiar flavours and many carry instant noodles, chilli sauce and pickled vegetables in their luggage ‘just in case’.

If the Maldives are to get negative coverage that leads to a tourism ban, maybe it should be because their courts are abusing human rights? Just a thought.