CHONGQING – A Chinese woman has riled netizens after creating a ruckus on a red-eye flight from Chongqing to Kuala Lumpur when cabin crew members spoke to her in English and not Mandarin.
Dubbed the “Gucci bag lady”, the woman on board an AirAsia flight on April 22 was seen scolding cabin crew in videos posted online, demanding: “Can’t you speak Mandarin? Why not? How can you work on an international flight when you cannot even understand Mandarin?”
The outburst, which caused a 1½-hour delay, came after she quarrelled with another passenger who had tapped her on the shoulder to remind her to lower her volume and not make calls before take-off.
It has raised questions about whether Chinese travellers have an inflated sense of entitlement due to the sheer size of the Chinese market and their spending power.
China is the world’s largest source of outbound travellers, with residents from mainland China accounting for 335 million cross-border trips in 2025.
The incident has also put a spotlight on whether airline practices need to be improved to ensure smoother interactions between service staff and passengers.
To be clear, no single country’s citizens have a monopoly on bad tourist behaviour.
In 2023, a Japanese passenger came under fire for scolding flight attendants on board a China Airlines flight for not speaking her native language when she was flying from Fukuoka to Taipei.
In a widely circulated 2017 video, a British passenger is seen bullying an Emirates flight attendant over a menu item, mocking her, questioning her intelligence and demanding a different meal because he did not like the “white fish” option.
In 2014, in what was infamously dubbed the “nut rage incident”, the heiress to Korean Air was jailed for ordering a plane to return to its gate and forcing a flight attendant to kneel and seek forgiveness for serving her nuts the wrong way.
In 2024 alone, more than 50,000 reports of unruly passenger behaviour were made by 60 airline operators.
This has driven some countries to impose penalties, including France, which introduced fines of up to €20,000 (S$30,000) and four-year flight bans on misbehaving passengers in 2025.
The AirAsia “Gucci bag lady” saga should neither be viewed as representative of a country as vast and varied as China, nor should it be condoned by her fellow countrymen.
The clip of her tantrum has, in the week since it happened, gone viral with some comments veering into xenophobia. The woman has also said that her family members have been attacked online.
Netizens have decried her outburst, calling her a disgrace and saying that the Malaysia-based airline is not legally obligated to hire Mandarin-speaking staff.
The behaviour of Chinese tourists is a favourite topic among my friends who are Chinese nationals and those who, like me, are foreigners in the country.
One of my Chinese friends told me that the “bad” behaviour some Chinese tourists exhibit is not because they feel entitled, but that they “can’t possibly care about the opinions of so many strangers”.
“They just focus on doing what they want, which can sometimes lead to inconsiderate behaviour that becomes more conspicuous when they are in a different country, with different norms,” he said.
Another reason that keeps popping up in our discussions is the fact that the Chinese do, in some sense, live in an environment where they are fed a narrative that China is the best.
State media – as part of an ongoing official push to cultivate national pride – often laud the country’s achievements, from its world-class digital payment system to global leadership in green energy, electric vehicles and artificial intelligence.
China’s restricted internet ecosystem, which blocks access to global platforms such as Google and WhatsApp, further reinforces this sense of pride.
Thus, when some Chinese go overseas, they may be genuinely puzzled as to why their putonghua (common language) is not more frequently used, and make constant comparisons between China and the destination country.
Some – such as the AirAsia passenger in the latest incident – may end up with strong emotions that they choose to act upon.
In her subsequent videos posted on Douyin, the passenger in question said she found it “unbelievable that a plane that was taking off from China had no crew on board who spoke Mandarin”.
According to the International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN agency, there are no mandatory language requirements for cabin crew, though the aviation industry uses English as a common language.
Regulators such as the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), however, require airline operators to ensure that crew members can communicate with each other in a common language, typically English.
But there will still be cases where travellers speak neither the language of the airline operator nor a more universal language such as English, EASA rules add.
For the AirAsia flight from Chongqing to Kuala Lumpur, the airline operator’s language is likely to be Malay.
Asian airlines in general require crew to also be proficient in English, the universal language of the aviation industry.
While some Asian airlines do hire Mandarin-speaking crew, proficiency in the language is not a prerequisite for hiring.
Given this context, the AirAsia passenger’s argument that all cabin crew on an international route like the flight she was taking should speak Mandarin does not hold water.
It is no wonder that laughter filled the cabin after she questioned: “Why can’t you speak Mandarin?”
