Who should be responsible exactly?

Last night, I run into a post in CityWeekend.com, and it titled as: Angry! Foreigners eating, drinking, shitting, pissing, sleeping on the Great Wall! Here are the pictures in that post.

Camping on Great Wall

Camping on Great Wall

Camping on Great Wall

Camping on Great Wall

No Camping on the Great Wall Sign

You may be very angry and raged when catching these photos, if you are a Chinese people. You must criticize them like this: you make our Great wonder become a big mess over there, and you are not interested in preserving world heritage. You are only concerned about your own fun and welfare, just egoistic. You just don’t respect others cultural heritage, except in your museums.

However, if you are a foreigner, you may think in this way: Why should we be blamed? Who took our money? Who sold us the sleeping bags, who took the bags up to the wall? Just you, Chinese people.

Your comments are all right and both of you make sense. It’s not our fault.

There is the fact: beginning from 2003, there have been people who have built ‘hotels’ for overnight tourists, renting sleeping bags to foreign tourists at a price of 400-500 yuan per person. It was reported that people were once allowed to stay overnight on the Great Wall, but must pay 100 yuan overnight stay fee and 50 yuan entrance fee. Although staying overnight on the Great Wall is no longer allowed presently, there are still the illegal agencies and management arrange it for the tourists.

Many of those coming to the 4A-level Jinshanling Great Wall scenic area are foreign tourists. After arriving at Jinshanling Great Wall, there are people on the sides hawking sleeping bags for personal profit. Jinshanling Great Wall itself is a lightning area, and previously here there have been incidents of tourists being struck by lightning!

I cannot help thinking of the British William-Lindsay leading a group of foreigners picking up trash on this portion of the Great Wall, doing everything to protect the Great Wall for 20 years, I don’t know whose face [foreigners or Chinese] should be red…

My point: there are no ‘Chinese People’ and ‘Foreigners’, and we are all global people. We are living in the big family – the globe, so all of us have the responsibility to pretect our environment.