It’s hard being a Chinese tourist. Reviled for bad behaviour one day and ripped off by everyone from taxi drivers to pickpockets the next, China’s newly minted travelling classes are having a tough year.

In typical fashion, the Chinese government appears intent on regulating away some of that pain. On October 1st China’s tourism industry came under a new set of rules, most intended to curb corruption in domestic travel and ease the burden on guides, groups and tourists travelling within the country. The law includes at least one clause that seems to have been inspired by a series of incidents that have revealed the apparently bad manners of Chinese tourists, on the mainland and overseas.

The number of Chinese travelling at leisure, both domestically and abroad, has grown tremendously in recent years, boosted by rising incomes, a less restrictive passport regime and softer limits on spending. The new tourism law aims to help the tourists themselves, mainly by preventing practices like the forced-march shopping excursions that are often led by ill-paid tour guides. The law also provides helpful advice to the many millions of mainland Chinese who do their pleasure-seeking abroad.

Section 13 advises Chinese tourists to behave themselves wherever they go in the world. The article is a nod to high-profile embarrassments like the one that a teenager caused by carving his mark—“Ding Jinhao was here”—into an ancient wall in the Egyptian ruins at Luxor earlier this year. Chinese tourists have drawn scorn after posting online snapshots of themselves hunting and devouring endangered sea clams in the Paracel islands, and others have produced fake marriage papers at resorts in the Maldives, in order to take advantage of free dinners. (Closer to home, the new law might have given pause to the group of Chinese tourists on Hainan island who inadvertently killed a stranded dolphin by using it as a prop in group portraits.) Spitting, shouting and sloppy bathroom etiquette have made the Chinese look like the world’s rudest new tourists, from London to Taipei and beyond.