China treating · Treating in China
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Treating in China
Treating in China
In China, restaurants and pubs are very common social places and treating plays an important part of socializing culture.
While splitting the bill is relatively accepted by young people - just relatively, treating is still the norm, especially when two are in obviously different social classes. Men are expected to treat women, elders to juniors, riches to poorer, hosts to guests, working class to non-income class(students). For friends of the same class, they prefer to split the chance of treating, rather than splitting the bill, i.e. this is my turn, and you treat next time.
It is common to see Chinese competing sweatily to pay your bill. You are expected to fight back and say 'it's my turn, you treat me next time.' The smiling loser will accuse the winner of being too courteous. All these dramas, despite still being common among all generations and usually played wholeheartedly, is decreasingly practiced among urban Chinese and the younger generation. Going dutch (where each party pays their respective part of the bill) is a growing trend, but more commonly, one of them will treat this time and expect you to treat next time.
Unless you only hang out with non-Chinese tourists, you will have fair chances of experiencing all these. For budget travelers, the good news is that Chinese tend to be eager to treat foreigners, although you shouldn't expect much from students and grassroots working class families and individuals.
That being said, Chinese tend to be very tolerant towards foreigners. If you feel like going dutch, try it. They tend to believe that "all foreigners prefer to go dutch". If they try to argue, it usually means that they insist on paying for your bill as well, not the opposite.
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China Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.