Chinas negatives now outweigh the positives!!

let's talk about five positive things about China so guys as you know in my videos I like to talk about life in China I like to give you an understanding of what society is like what it's like to live there hopefully there's some misunderstandings that I've helped clear up and also something curious or interesting about China that you maybe didn't know about but rather than focusing on you know sort of perhaps troubling social issues today today I'm going to talk about five awesome things that you'll find only in China first we're going to talk about urban villages now I have some devastating news for everyone out there as I was going through my list here of things that I love about China I discovered that the things that I loved about China that drew me to China in the first place have all taken a turn for the worse so let's get back to the urban villages follow me when I first arrived in China more specifically Shenzhen there was a part of the city that really caught my fancy I mean of course you've got these beautiful skyscrapers and neon lights and so on and they're very interesting but it was like I've told you guys many times before there were these little urban villages now these are kind of the older of style of China you'd be able to walk in there and see everyday life people getting their vegetables and fresh meat and stuff to go and cook for the day because that's the Chinese way of life and just being able to hang around all day people watching and seeing all the differences in the culture between where I was from and China it was a very freeing experience for me because I'd be able to sit down and have barbecue at night watch the crowds drink beer meet people you know being a foreigner I was very different for most people so a lot of people would come and talk to me and I made some friends and and got to know people in the area and I used to love it now having this freedom to go out and just explore these urban villages see the daily lifestyle try different kinds of street food be able to sit down and relax and have a beer and just soak it all up unfortunately it's no longer really a thing in the larger cities China and that's because these little urban villages are seen as dirty and standing in the way of progress now rather than repeating myself I have a video which I filmed in one of these urban villages that were being knocked down you can go and take a look and see exactly what's happening but basically to cut a long story short the government is demolishing these urban villages some of them ancient some of them not so old but demolishing them in order to put in high-rise buildings or put in office blocks or a new apartment blocks things like that and in essence they are destroying that culture that sort of richness that I saw and the thing that drew me to China in the first place because once that's gone it becomes very bland and very boring a normal apartment building will have a security guard it'll have a little Park for the kids to play in it'll have one or two shops situated either inside or on the outskirts and that's it people study they go home or they go to work or whatever and you just don't get that same vibe there just isn't the same sort of street life you don't get to sit outside and have a beer and watch people walk by in and meet people it's gone it's sterilized so this number one thing that really drew me to China this this freedom to go out in and be a part of society in kind of a voyeuristic way anyway is no longer really an option in the biggest cities let's move on to number two I'm not sure if you're aware of this but exploring China has always been a passion of mine I've been around the entire country barring Tibet and Xinjiang and that was because of political reasons you need permits and stuff and that couldn't be asked to be honest I've got television documentaries of exploring all the way through the northeastern provinces then all of the southern provinces and of course personally I've been on motorcycle rides and visited all over the country over the 14 and a half years have been living in China I've been lucky enough to see more of China than most Chinese people have ever seen and I've been able to sit there and like I said what I like to do is absorb the local culture so every time I visit a new city I don't just stay in a hotel first thing I usually do is as long as I'm not doing work obviously if I go out and I walk the streets I explore I take video footage and b-roll as you've seen all the footage you always see in my videos that stuff I've shot myself I like to go and do that that's what I do have a couple beers try to meet some people you know just talk to the locals things like that so I've managed to experience a lot around China however one thing has really bugged me has woke me from the beginning and it is getting worse again is this kind of restriction on travel these days for foreigners now hear me out obviously China's become easier to access through the high-speed rail networks there's no doubt about that right but because of this little remote villages places that I would visit that literally would never have seen a foreigner before they've been quite a few instances where I'd be riding a motorbike through some random mountain village or something stopped and people would be taking photos and stuff they would actually go and call their families and friends to come out of the house to come see the foreigner that doesn't really exist anymore now I don't want to sound like a Marco Polo guy you know you get that thing in in China and in Asia really where you have this kind of Marco Polo syndrome where foreigners go there and expect to be very special and I'm the first one to ever discover this you know it's pretty evident to you you'll see it a lot if you deal with expats who go and live overseas I'm not interested in that what I'm interested in is the fact that the charm of these small places is being eroded away because what happens is they come in with a high-speed rail and then they push this massive urban development which in essence wipes out the charm puts the same cookie cutter concrete buildings if there's anything of a touristy nature in the area like a beautiful mountain or something they'll put up all the tourist infrastructure very badly by the way and turn it into a mess it's it's horrible because you'll see like an ancient temple or something and they'll be like that doesn't look good enough so they knock it down and build a new one this is not exaggeration this is happening all of China right now we're they're knocking down you know old historical sites and replacing them with like fake facades and replicas and if they don't do that there at least painting over them and it's quite common to see fake bricks in China where they'll just paint the lines on the wall to make it look like it's bricks but the you know it's just a concrete screed so China's losing a lot of its charm all these like beautiful little places I used to visit and let's also quickly just talk about the fact that foreigners can't stay in hotels in rural areas it's very very difficult I get a lot of pushback when I mention this but that's because most foreigners who travel around China don't go to the rural areas that I've been to and of course if my partner Seema when we travel around we're always going to some strange little town a village that no one's ever heard of and you arrive and none of the hotels are allowed to let foreigners stay in them they just don't have the capacity you know the system where you have to enter the Chinese ID card and stuff they don't have the ability to input a foreigners passport and this is very frustrating and we've been turned away countless times from places and anyone who's traveled into the rural parts of China not even rural you can go to the big cities of China even in places like Shanghai and Beijing if you go to the outskirts and you try to stay in a cheap hotel very often they'll be like sorry no foreigners allowed and this is very very frustrating on top of this this kind of traveling by train you know traveling on a foreign passport is of course possible you can go buy tickets it's no big deal but it's a lot more of a hassle and if you have a Chinese ID card here for instance you can see my wife walking up to a machine here at the local train station scanning her ID card and getting her tickets straight away I as a foreigner on the other hand have to go and stand in a queue with you know lots of people beggars bugging me these are the people that don't have all their like documents in order people that don't have their new ID cards sorted out things like that they've got some kind of an issue with something so they have to join the foreigners standing in queue manually buy your ticket with your passport it's very inconvenient and sometimes the the weight in these queues can be hours depending on the time of year of course if there's a big holiday or something you're in for a big shock so the the sort of unfriendliness towards foreign passport so it's not even fair to call it an unfriendliness it's just the unpreparedness towards using a foreign passport in any of China's sort of transportation systems can be a real pain in the ass let's move on to the next thing one thing I absolutely loved about China when I came to China I even got a video about it is how easy it was for me to open up a bank account you know this is way before the days of wheelchairs or anything like that and you know having a bank account is something you need if you're going to be paying around to paying your utilities things like that and I open several just by walking into the bank with my passport going to the counter filling out a form like something like 10 15 minutes later I'd have my debit card of course you can't get a credit card doing that but you could get a normal savings girl you know debit card you can walk out within 10 or 15 minutes and you had your bank card in your hand which is something very different to the west where you kind of have to go into a bank and proof of residence so that kind of nonsense and then later you get your card in the mail it's very very annoying but in China I found it very efficient and I found the banking system very efficient because at the ATM you could just put money in to the ATM it counts it for you right there straight away in your bank account which is different from where I'm from I know that around the world that's changed these days a lot of ATMs can take cash but for me I thought this was fantastic getting money and depositing money you know from the bank it's very easy through the ATM system however again this convenience and all of this has changed China is now because of the economy the economy going down they are putting massive stops to any US dollars going out of China so there's a couple of things I want to talk about here number one opening a bank account is not as easy as it used to be now you need to have a certain type of visa you need to have you know obviously your residence permit or your temporary residence permit and a bunch of other documents before you can even go in to open your account so in the past where you only ever needed a passport to walk in there they did ask you to write down your address but you didn't need to show them some kind of proof or anything those days are long gone now it's a lot more complicated and difficult so for instance just an example when my sister visited me in China she was able to go with me to the local bank we opened up an account for her and put money in the bank so that she didn't have to walk around with cash and of course that was incredibly convenient because you know pickpocketing and theft is a big problem in the cities of China you don't want to be walking around with cash so now she had a card she could go and pay for things with the card and draw money from the ATM so that's not possible anymore if you arrive on a tourist visa you know you can't just go open a bank account and of course the whole thing about u.s. dollars now if you're a foreigner you cannot change your RMB that you've earned in China into US dollars it's just not possible and transferring money overseas from your account requires a lot of paperwork and there's some very heavy restrictions so you may go to China and earn a lot of money but getting that money out is proving to be harder and harder by the day anyway that's just one of the things I loved about China that's no longer there let's move on to the next one now the next thing that I would like to address is probably the biggest disappointment for me and that is the curiosity and friendliness of the locals in China it was like I said in the beginning sitting down having a barbeque having something to eat and he would often be approached or you'd be when I was younger you know you go to a club I'm not into that stuff in war but you go to a club and there'd be a guy's at a table you know wants to show off to his friends so he'd invite the foreigner over and buy you drinks and stuff there was always this very friendly even if it was coming from a selfish place a lot of the time because her face but there was always this kind of friendly attitude towards foreigners you know but you know the Chinese society China I should say Chinese societies is very gullible you I don't even know if that's the correct word but if the state starts to push a narrative in the media people eat it up and they change their minds and their attitudes very very quickly without ever questioning it which is something that really bugs the hell out of me so with the trade war recently with the economy slowing down recently in China there has been a very big ante for in a push and they find any kind of excuse for this something happens in the South China Sea immediately on the headlines it's all about how bad America is or how bad this country is or how about that country's a company overseas forgets to include Taiwan in a map all of a sudden everyone hates French people you know it's it's one of those things that you can feel it's almost tangible as you walk down the streets I felt it a few times in the beginning when I was in China especially before the 2008 Beijing Olympics when you know sort of freed Tibet activists were trying to put out the Olympic torch foreigners became enemies overnight and it was incredibly dangerous to walk around at least it felt that way people would stare at me people were not friendly people you know didn't even want to talk to me because foreigners are now the bad trying to put China down the same thing happens whenever there's a big thing in the news you know all of a sudden if you're American you're gonna have people being unfriendly to you there's gonna be signs up there saying like no Americans allowed in here or you know Americans are gonna play paid 25% more tarah because of the tariffs you have to pay 25 percent more in my restaurant you know there's almost kind of nationalistic [ __ ] you know you see signs in China on the restaurants they'll be like no Japanese or dogs allowed on the on the you know restaurant I've seen these myself I find it very insulting it's just the way it is but I don't like the fact that you pick up on this very sort of negative attitude towards foreigners these days and it's because that's what the state is pushing so this friendliness is hospitality this kind of open-hearted approach towards foreigners even if it does come from like I said a face point-of-view was something that I absolutely used to love about China and it's horrible to see that being eroded away bit by bit now the next thing that I absolutely loved about China when I first got to China was the cost of living I couldn't believe it the first time in my life I could go out every day for food at a restaurant now you see where I'm from and probably where you're from restaurants are expensive it's all I mean it's all got to do with the service industry really and the thing about China is because of the large population labor and service industry stuff is all very cheap because of the large population and if someone doesn't want to do it somebody else will do it so you get that kind of situation going on where you can't go to a restaurant and I would be spending 20 to 30 RMB on a meal now this is obviously like many years back so let me put that into perspective for you I was paying between three and say five US dollars for a meal I'm not talking about like a mcdonald's happy meal here by the way I'm talking about a sit down have a beer have a big plate of whatever it is maybe two plates of different things and to me this was very freeing I could really just enjoy life because you know you finish work what are you doing you go with your friends you go to a restaurant you don't need to worry about it being a big burden on your finances you know you can start to really just chill out and it's a massive draw was a massive draw rent was also although now that I think about it's not not too bad it was still very reasonable very cheap when I started renting I was paying about sorry threw about 3,000 RMB a month thereabouts for the apartment I was staying in it was actually incredibly reasonable the thing is this cost of living has just only ever increased and it's increased to a point where it's not worth it anymore I hear me out when you go to a place like China you put up with a lot okay a lot of negatives because of the positives I don't mind dealing with things like questionable food quality especially when you're younger you don't really care right potentially drinking fake beer bad air pollution you know dodgy this and that what's annoys people being rude spitting in front of you dealing with the smells the sights the sounds that normally would be very off-putting because you can you can kind of brush that aside and say you know what at least I'm happy everyone's kind of happy we can all sit down and have a beer enjoy ourselves I can have a fantastic time here with my friends having a big meal at a restaurant my rents not very expensive I can save money you know I can go out and do things that I usually wouldn't be able to do because I've got disposable income now and so you you kind of look past all that stuff but bear in mind when you eating cheap when you're paying small amounts of money that's when you're kind of living the lifestyle of somebody who is in the lower sort of lower class in China because middle class and upper class people in China spend a lot of money they don't go out to these cheap restaurants they don't you know live in small cheap apartments they spend big they're usually buying houses which cost millions these days they go to fancy restaurants that end up costing like hundreds of US dollars a night if you go to a big one so as your lifestyle kind of improves as your station in life I should say starts to improve so do the costs but not only that's the cost of everything in China has been going up and up and up so now it's reached a point that if you kind of want to live a nice lifestyle you are paying the same or and even more than you would pay in the West for the equivalent lifestyle so it's reached a point where is it really worth it if I can spend X amount of money to kind of have a reasonable quality of life in China but it's the same or more than living in a developed country what's the point why not just go live in a developed country unless of course you have a deep love of the the Chinese culture and you know you've got some kind of reason to really be there financially it's no longer really worth it you know you can still go around Southeast Asia and stuff and find incredibly cheap countries to live and have that sort of vibrant exciting adventurous lifestyle but China is becoming less and less attractive that way now you're paying the same as you would if you lived in a place like Australia or Canada or the u.s. so you know you got to start weighing that up so that thing that I loved so much as well has started to become eroded so what I'm trying to get at with this video everyone is that the things the things that I dearly dearly loved about China the things that drew me to China the things that I very very often used to trumpet in my first original videos the parts of China that I absolutely adore are slowly but surely disappearing so it's not that I'm trying to find fault here I'm just trying very hard to find what it is other than family and friends and kind of the idea of this friendliness and acceptance that I first felt when I got to China what is it that I can find positive about China helped me out in the comments section I would like you to please leave one positive thing that you know about China that you've experienced in China because I need you to help me find these things so that I can make more positive videos about China because honestly I'm getting to the point now where it's it's tough it's tough to think of things that really make me smile and want me to go back I hope you get to experience some of these things that I've experienced in China and I can't wait to see you in the next video guys don't forget every single Friday you can catch another serpens a day down below wednesday's lao 86 as usual and ADV china Monday's the most important we also have that fortnightly live show come and take a look I think you'll enjoy it and until next time you know the drill as always stay awesome

Channel: serpentza

Views: 366,988

Rating: 4.7335296 out of 5

Keywords: China, Living in China as a foreigner, Banking in China, Cost of living in china, hospitality in china, travel in China, shenzhen, working in china, moving to china, work in china, winston sterzel, live in china, adv china, laowhy86, expats in china, chinese government, living in china as an american, expat in china, cmilk, move to china, living abroad, ccp, advchina, teaching in china, prc, china how it is, teach english in china, moving to asia, teach in china, Winston Sterzel

Id: e1oLJdJfZI8

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 15 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/confuciusx]

Chinese people no longer worship his white ass, so he is now mad. He wants to bad mouth China because of this! Pathetic!

He white ass needs to head back to South Africa so racist shit can be thrown at him day in and day out.

I hope his wife can see through his lies and divorce his poor pathetic ass just like beer girl did. He has no real job or career, other than BeggarsTube he can’t make a living.

[u/Asteria1983]

South African apartheid trash, trying to relive days where Caucasians are worshiped.

[u/ExploitedChildren]

The future is the Chinese hegemony, suck my golden rod cumskins.

[u/soooooxixi]

As much as people try to justify and defend him,

Dude just hates Asian patriarchy and wants to see a day when the USA UK installs a bunch of white dudes in the Chinese government.