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Seoul To Crack Down On 'dumping Tours' That Herd Chinese Tourists Into Shops With Overpriced Goods

As foreign travellers return to Seoul after three pandemic years, so does the illegal practice known as "dumping tours" that threatens to taint the reputation of South Korea's capital city as a popular tourist destination.

These dumping tours refer to package tours where tourists are herded into retail stores and virtually forced to buy overpriced products such as cosmetics, nutritional supplements and duty-free items.

Other than the forced shopping, their itinerary in Seoul consists mostly of tourist spots where entry is free. They have to pay extra to participate in "optional tour activities", though the all-inclusive package tours guarantee visits to the city's major tourist sites.

Tourists wearing traditional Korean hanbok cross a street near Gwanghwamun, the largest gate of Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul. Photo: Xinhua

These unfair practices often involve unqualified tourism interpreter guides called "tour conductors" – foreign nationals without a valid guide licence – who are hired by domestic tour agencies. The main revenue sources of these unqualified guides are commissions from the shops.

Victims of dumping tours seem to be on the rise in recent months as local tourist agencies increasingly seek to capitalise on Chinese tourists after the Chinese government lifted its years-long ban on group travel to South Korea in August.

Earlier this month, the Seoul Metropolitan Government announced stern measures on "low-priced dumping tours" that taint the city's reputation and cast a shadow on the tourism sector's post-pandemic recovery.

Chinese tourists at the MLB clothing store inside a duty free store in Seoul. Photo: Bloomberg

According to Seoul City on Sunday, city officials had conducted crackdowns across major tourist sites in Jung District on October 12 and Jongno District on October 26, during which they found one unqualified "tour conductor" and three "sitting guides" on the spot. Sitting guides refer to licensed guides who are hired to sit on the tour bus, instead of actually guiding the tourists, in case of a crackdown by officials.

The city officials will conduct another on-site inspection of tourist spots in Mapo District in the coming days, and further inspections across shopping malls and duty-free shops will take place without prior notice starting from November.

"The number of tourists visiting Seoul is expected to increase towards the year-end. We will continue making efforts to eradicate illegal practices to make sure that every tourist can enjoy their time here and return with only happy memories of Seoul," said Kim Young-hwan, head of Seoul City's tour and sports bureau.

Pvt. Travis King, Soldier Who Fled To North Korea, Faces Desertion And Child Pornography Charges

Pvt. Travis King -- the young soldier who ran across the border into North Korea in July, triggering fears about a hostage situation before he was released without conditions in September -- is now facing eight different charges from the Army, including desertion and child pornography.

King's charge sheet, which was reviewed by Military.Com, alleges that, in the days before the private dashed across one of the most heavily guarded borders in the world, he solicited nude images from an underage Snapchat user and possessed a video of a minor engaged in sexual activity.

The charges also allege that King was insubordinate toward his superiors in the fall of 2022, during a period in which he faced separate legal troubles in Seoul for allegedly assaulting locals and vandalizing a police car. He's also accused of assaulting an officer and lying to superiors.

Read Next: The Army Needs a Lot of Money for Barracks, But It's Fighting for Pocket Change

King's mother, Claudine Gates, said that she loves her son "unconditionally" and she is "extremely concerned about his mental health," in a statement provided by family spokesman Jonathan Franks.

"As his mother, I ask that my son be afforded the presumption of innocence," Gates said, adding that she believes "something happened to [King] while he was deployed."

Questions about the circumstances of King's departure for North Korea, including allegations by local South Korean law enforcement, remain.

King was accused of assault on Sept. 25, 2022, according to reporting from several outlets citing court records. Seoul police alleged he pushed and punched a patron at a bar who refused to buy him a drink. Those charges were ultimately dropped.

Then, two weeks later, just before 4 a.M. On Oct. 8, 2022, King was arrested in Mapo, South Korea, and placed in a squad car. He allegedly refused to answer questions, kicked the car's doors and ranted: "F--- Korean, f--- Korean army, f--- Korean police," ultimately being fined about $3,950 and paying nearly $800 for damage to the police car, according to reports.

The charging documents show that the repercussions from Army leadership following those incidents were swift.

Between Sept. 30, 2022, and Oct. 8, 2022, an Army captain repeatedly ordered King not to leave the pair of Army bases that are situated between Seoul and the Demilitarized Zone that borders North Korea; to be escorted when he was outside his barracks; and not to drink alcohol. The charging documents allege that he violated all those orders.

Another series of charges stems from King's alleged behavior on Oct. 8, 2022.

The charges claim that three soldiers -- a staff sergeant and two sergeants -- were sent to "apprehend" King. King, in turn, attempted to escape from them and, in the process, kicked the staff sergeant in the head.

A separate assault charge alleges King also struck a second lieutenant in the head that day.

NBC reported that King was ultimately detained by South Korea for 48 days over failing to pay the fines leveled at him over his actions in Mapo that October.

Once released from a South Korean prison, the Army was ready to send him back to Fort Bliss, Texas, to face additional military discipline. Instead, he somehow ended up on a civilian tour of the border village of Panmunjom, a major tourist attraction, where he proceeded to dash into North Korea on July 18.

The move stunned Army leaders.

Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth said that King "may not have been thinking clearly, frankly, but we just don't know," days after his flight to North Korea.

King was ultimately returned to U.S. Officials on Sept. 27, 2023, according to the date range of his desertion charge. The American media would report the story the next day.

Franks revealed that King will be defended by five lawyers including Franklin Rosenblatt, the same attorney who served as lead military defense counsel for Bowe Bergdahl's court-martial on desertion charges.

The choice is notable since Bergdahl's situation is perhaps the closest parallel to King's.

Bergdahl was a soldier in the 1st Battalion, 501st Regiment, who walked away from his post in Afghanistan and was captured by the Taliban, triggering a military search, in 2009. He was held captive for five years before finally being released in a prisoner swap for five U.S. Detainees. Despite his long captivity, military officials still charged the soldier with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy.

Bergdahl's legal trials ended up lasting for years and drew scores of controversy and debate. Despite the fact that the military ended up securing an initial conviction at court-martial -- Bergdahl pleaded guilty in 2017 -- that decision was later overturned on appeal and the case is still being litigated to this day.

-- Konstantin Toropin can be reached at konstantin.Toropin@military.Com. Follow him on X at @ktoropin.

Related: 'He's in a Real Bad Place': US Makes Little Progress in Getting Pvt. Travis King Back from North Korea

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The 'Real' Kung Pao Chicken — And Why I Hope I Never Find It

Ask someone outside China to name a few iconic Chinese dishes, and you'll likely hear some familiar names. Peking duck is one, mapo tofu is probably another. But if you had to pick one Chinese dish that is known worldwide, it would be hard to argue with putting kung pao chicken, or gongbao jiding, at the top of the list.

Gongbao jiding is so well known that many of us can't even decide what to call it. English menus outside China often use the old Wade-Giles spelling of "kung pao" — a name more befitting of a campy martial arts movie — while others use the pinyin version of gongbao.

Similar linguistic issues exist even in China, where there is agreement on the pronunciation, but not always on the characters. Menus might write "gong" with the character meaning palace or the one meaning public. "Bao" might be written with the character meaning treasure, protect, or, perhaps the most apt of all, the "bao" in baochao — to fry over high heat.

And then there's the dish itself. The jiding part, the two characters that everyone can agree on, means "chicken cut into little cubes" — and is also pretty much where the similarities end. Beyond this very basic feature, there is little agreement about any other part of the dish. Even the special ingredient most commonly associated with this chicken dish — peanuts — is up for grabs.

The taste of the dish varies within China almost as much as it does abroad. I have had gongbao jiding at the top of Mount Tai, on a boat plying the Pearl River, and on the Hulunbuir grasslands. Each place had its own unique way of making the dish, from brilliantly spicy versions made with generous handfuls of dried chaotian chilies and numbing Sichuan peppercorns, to others that are unbearably salty or even sickly sweet.

Besides cross-cut sections of long Shandong onions, cooks might add cubes of carrot, cucumber, or lettuce stem. Sometimes the peanuts are fried with the chicken, sometimes they are just scattered on top. And that's not even counting the new wave of frozen and canned versions.

Gongbao jiding can even be made with tomato sauce — for me, that's one culinary bridge too far.

Even in Sichuan province, where gongbao jiding holds iconic pride of place, it is hard to point to a universal standard for the authentic dish. Whenever I try to get a definitive answer from my friends in the Chengdu restaurant scene about the correct way to make gongbao jiding, I always hear the same disappointing refrain: that everyone makes it differently.

Some cooks start the dish with a heaping spoonful of red Pixian chili bean paste — doubanjiang — others recoil at the thought. Sure, my instructors at cooking school in Chengdu do teach one particular way to make gongbao jiding (with bean paste, just a touch), but their reasoning is that this is the taste diners are expecting. These same instructors are also happy to teach students about the all-important skill of swapping out ingredients when supplies are running low.

All of this happy diversity flies in the face of recent efforts by local tourism boards to standardize the taste, smell, and look of iconic foods like Lanzhou noodles and Guangxi's fermented luosifen snail noodles.

How about the origins of the dish itself? Would knowing about the first gongbao jiding give us a clearer idea of what the "authentic" dish is?

Like a lot of iconic foods, there is an entire mythology about how gongbao jiding was invented. The best-known story revolves around Ding Baozhen, a Qing dynasty official who traveled around China performing his official duties while his retinue of cooks picked up new tastes and techniques at each stop. The story goes that it was the triangular culinary circuit from Ding's home in the southwest Guizhou province to his postings in Shandong and Sichuan that resulted in the iconic dish. This narrative accounts for two different characters of "bao," which appear in Ding's name and posthumous title respectively.

Whether this origin story is true or not — there's no particular evidence for or against it — it still does not tell us what an authentic version of the dish tastes like or how it should be made. Even if we could pinpoint the precise moment that gongbao jiding came into being, we still wouldn't know how that first dish was made, much less how it actually tasted.

That's because looking for definitive origins of popular culture is already something of a trap. Nobody knows who wrote the original version of traditional folktales like Cinderella because there was no author, at least not just one. Every time someone sat down to tell the story, the details changed a little bit, adding that one variation to a long line of creative voices. What people who study these things look for are the component pieces — themes like evil stepmothers or talking animals. These pieces are constantly being arranged into new creations, which is why a lot of folktales end up sounding vaguely similar to each other.

Change Cinderella to carbonara (or any other heritage food) and you see the same thing. Flavors and techniques are always being reused and rearranged. It doesn't really matter who invented gongbao jiding, because that first dish was just a variation of something else.

That's if it even existed. A 1902 travel guide to Chengdu lists nearly a hundred famous local dishes, but no mention of anything resembling gongbao jiding. It's not until the 1950s that the dish starts to show up in Chinese cookbooks, and definitely not in the form that we know it today. In a version from 1956, a whole chicken (small bones and all) is cubed and deep fried in pork fat, stir fried with garlic and dried chilies, and finally topped with peanuts and drizzled with pungent fermented tofu juice. Cookbooks from the subsequent decades are anything but consistent, with some using pork instead of chicken and others omitting the iconic peanuts entirely.

It wasn't until the 1990s that cookbooks started to agree on the common features of the dish that many people today would recognize. But by then, new industrial food chains had also made their presence known, meaning that, for many, the most "authentic" gongbao jiding is the kind you get from a convenience store steam tray — the goopy but somehow comforting union of deboned chicken breast and industrially-produced sauces.

But does authenticity even matter? The popularity of recent inventions like Zibo barbecue or KFC's New Orleans spice might make you think that it doesn't. But staking a claim to a famous dish can be a goldmine, especially if that claim gets multiplied through restaurant franchises or packaged food.

What gets lost? Everything else, basically. Sichuan, Shandong, and Guizhou all make gongbao jiding differently, yet each has a reasonable claim to the dish. Even those local tastes that might not please the "purist" are still something to appreciate. But as China's food chains grow ever smoother, we may soon face a world with only one taste for gongbao jiding.

I for one would miss the other versions. Even the one with tomato sauce.

Editors: Cai Yineng and Vincent Chow; portrait artist: Wang Zhenhao.

(Header image: IC)

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