Chinese Guides without a Salary
You may be forgiven to assume that Chinese guides accompanying tourgroups receive a salary to do their job. This is usually not the case. And not only that, in fact they often even have to pay a Chinese tour operator to be assigned a tour. This may be a 'modest' 100 yuan (10 euro) per client, but it may just as well be an amount as high as 500 yuan. The guides are supposed to make enough money from tips and commissions to recover the investment and besides earn a living. Needless to say what the effects of this system will be on your tours. The guide will not take your customers to the highest quality acrobatics show in Beijing, but to the one that pays him (or her) the highest commission instead. The guide will not take your clients to the restaurants best for them, but to those best for himself. When your guests would be best served by returning to the hotel after a long excursion, the guide will instead take them to souvenir shops, chasing the commission he or she depends on.
You will have to circumvent the problem. One easy way is to give the guide a salary directly, your tourleader can hand it over to him. I find that once the financal pressure is of, many guides change their hunting-for-money habits, and work in the best interest of their tourists.
The same system whereby the guide 'buys' a group of tourists from the tour operator is by the way applied to Chinese guides going abroad as a tourleader with Chinese tourists. Things can get more exciting than tourists just receiving bad service. I once witnessed a Chinese tour operator nervously talking into two mobile phones at the same time. His tourgroup was stuck in a bus in Thailand. A conflict was brewing between its Thai guide and its Chinese tourleader about the sharing of commissions. The Thai had taken matters into his own hands, and with a couple of his friends was waiting outside the bus, making it very clear he was armed. It ended with the Chinese tour operator promising to pay what the guide owed.