Guy Talks About Living in a Dictatorship During COVID

nobody's gonna try and leave you know what this government does to people you become a QR code in here it feels genuinely dystopian hey everyone Azeal here really quick before this video starts I now have a second Channel where I do stuff having to do with programming in AI if you are at all interested in that stuff I already have a video up on there where I used the incel forums to train a chat bot to finish sentences like an Intel so if you're at all interested go ahead and check it out it's in the description other than that onto the video the reason I am in China is because well technically I can't tell you that much but stuff with uh foreign affairs so you can't tell me why you're in China but you are something to do with foreign affairs right that's what you said my family is because I'm still technically a minor and so the government goes hey you got to follow these people as you will come to find out I'm uh I'm not the biggest fan of the government um so I personally don't work for them ah yeah fair enough so we got stationed here during 2020 we got sent here like during the pandemic which was really interesting to like you know move during actually to China which is like you know the the place but thankfully actually where I live Shanghai there would there was almost no cases at that time it had pretty much moved east to west all the way into the U.S already and so by the time we got here it was pretty much fine but we still had to do like multiple weeks of quarantine and that kind of stuff um moving here was you know a pretty major culture shock especially in terms of I guess what stuck out to me the most is surveillance everything is watching you all the time everywhere no matter what it's an interesting phenomenon I remember when we when we got here we got a briefing and they go yeah everything is recording you all the time uh my phone which is like right over there as I've been told supposedly the camera and microphone are always on even if it says it isn't wow either that's because it actually is or it's because you got to pretend it is in order to not pretend but you got to act like it is in order to keep like opsec but you know it's definitely unnerving to know you're always being watched it's an interesting example of The Human Condition a fairly disturbing example of the human condition that we just adapted to it eventually the fact that you know this can happen and then you are eventually like yeah it's normal that my phone is recording me all the time is you know it's a strange feeling yeah I can't imagine as a Westerner what it would be like to have someone paying attention all the time I mean we've got the CIA and they're not the best but they're nothing like that yeah my my best example that I always sort of loop back to whenever I try and explain the surveillance thing is uh the Chinese government is openly doing what the U.S government is denying it's doing and then some yeah it's weird the way they they spin hyper surveillance into a into a positive thing a lot of stuff that would not fly anywhere else in the world this is a really interesting phenomenon that is pretty much exclusive to China first off everybody everybody everybody has a phone like Littlest kids to the oldest dudes have mobile phones which I guess is not that uncommon anymore but you know everybody has one of two apps and most the time both like every human being on the Chinese Mainland they are alipay also known as jifabow and WeChat which is the one that most people have heard of right those effectively do everything you ever need to do it sounds like I'm pitching it but it's more dystopian than you'd expect you know I can open my phone uh I open that app and I can pay people I may be able to get paid I'm able to like transfer money to my bank I'm able to like get travel tickets I can watch movie reviews I can order like my groceries I can do pretty much anything centralized in one app there's like uber in there not Uber but the Chinese Uber and then the Chinese ubereats and then I can like order stuff off taobao slash Amazon it's like everything you would ever need to do is centralized in one app all the covid stuff too so if I want to like you know if I want to go into a movie theater I gotta scroll past like my legal residency all the information that's pretty much ever existed about me centralized on one app and just like show the door guy just a code you become a QR code in here because there's so many people in China that effectively you are you know there's that that joke that like oh yeah to the government you're just a statistic but you really are you have another app that does the same [ __ ] but kind of different and it's pretty much the same thing so I have two apps that know everything about me ever I haven't touched cash in like two years wow like anything to do with money is on your phone you can walk into like the most hole in the wall store you can walk into like you know any tiny Mom and Pop shop and they have a QR code and so you like you know you take your like a chocolate bar or whatever put it on the counter they scan it they punch some numbers into a machine and then they point to the QR code I'm I'd assume they'd say things to you but I also don't speak Chinese so they just they see how white I am and they just go I'm just gonna point for this guy and they point a QR code you know I take out my phone I scan the QR the QR code and I just assume that my phone has paid them so it's not like cash app it's not like small sums of money like I've I've paid like 600 worth of stuff on my phone oh that's probably not that much to most people but to me it is another major culture shock thing for me was uh just the amount of police everywhere I explained it to one of my friends back in Canada as uh like Dark Souls enemies which sounds bad but um it's the most the most apt comparison is Dark Souls enemies because there's cops everywhere but there's different like tiers of cops right you have like the the bottom guys which are almost always they're called bow on it's security and it's like essentially they wear like this black outfit and they just have like this hat and it's almost always just old dudes that sit at the gates of buildings there's usually like one at every intersection and they just sit there they have like a radio sometimes they don't even have a radio their main job is to yell at you if you do the wrong thing so you know if you like cross the street when you're not supposed to there's Mall Cops but everywhere it's everywhere cops it's like Paul blart's wet dream um then above that you have like the traffic cops these guys have like little scooters and they wear black pants and a white shirt and they usually have a baton as well as a radio and these guys are actually hired by the police the other guys are like hired by Regional governments these guys are hired by the police department and uh they also basically just yell at you but they're more in more populated areas sometimes if you're lucky they'll direct traffic the rest of their job is just kind of standing around and going like hey you can't do that it's again just pretty much just old dudes I assume they just like you know how like Walmart hires retirees to be greeters I think the government just hires old dudes to like yell at teenagers and then the tier above that these guys are more Uncommon uh these are like police police they look like I don't know American police but they look like Canadian cops you know they look like what you'd expect a cop to look like they have like the vest and that they drive squad cars and these guys can actually do things to you they have the Baton taser all the all the tech and stuff they don't have guns because there's like no guns here my only interaction with them is I have been driving my scooter for like eight kilometers on a highway that you're not supposed to drive scooters on and I don't speak Chinese so the traffic cop had to call this guy to come yell at me you know that was my fault the interesting thing about those guys is they um they have like okay a ritual sounds weird uh but every morning you can like sometimes hear them if you go by a police station they like they go to the police station and they'll like line up like in ranks uh they'd grab like riot shields and bang them with sticks and yell not like oh Battle Cry but I assume they're doing like a call and response thing it's really trippy when you hear it because you know it's like some Hunger Games [ __ ] you walk past the police station and you see like 40 dudes screaming and then above that that is when I started where like it's a thing that really made me go like oh I am in a police state is I was like walking to my girlfriend's house right and I just see like imagine a scary cop black van with the antennas I saw that it was a giant black Mercedes van with the windows pitch black and like sonar antennas and everything on top of it just parked in an intersection and along the rim of it is like 20 cameras in every conceivable angle that's when you really notice like oh big brother is here I don't want to make a the quintessential 1984 reference that every Angry old white guy in the U.S makes but you know it is that and then above that you have like you know the secret police they're dressed in all black they technically don't exist they definitely exist those are the guys that are in like those are the guys that are in the No-No fans so that sounds terrifying what about the response to the pandemic because I'm guessing it all got worse after that oh yeah yeah okay so you may have seen it in the news I live in Shanghai if you've seen the news recently it's that one it's the one where we've been in lockdown for two months and like in the really inner city region people have been locked down for so long and so harshly that people have genuinely starved to death it's really really intense and it's insane once you hear the numbers because you know I I hear about like where I'm from in Canada and they're like hey new record we only got 500 new cases today but like we went into lockdown at 500 cases total obviously conspiracy theory is it's like a system of control but effectively speaking they don't want more coven and they're willing to take any hit that comes with it we got locked down pretty much sort of like late March and you know in the beginning they told us like you know oh it's only gonna be a four day lockdown and then you know here we are basically three months later we're essentially told okay so the way that Shanghai is organized is well I mean they're called compounds I guess in American is the better English in English is the best translation it's basically a lot of the the areas is you have like main highways and then off of those you have uh like a usually a road with a gate and then apartment buildings like commie blocks kind of uh but they're not like the commie block buildings that you'd expect they're regular buildings but they are effectively commy blocks with the gates they are communes I I mean with 30 million people in it yeah Jesus first they told us okay you have to stay in your compound and so we're like okay whatever so we go to our houses we do that four days goes by and then it's just like oh they're not letting us out we can't leave and then so that we we hear from like the news and what's not that um yeah they're extending all walk down indefinitely and so it's like okay well [ __ ] you know you know we were fine because we have food uh in like storage not like prepper style but we have cans of pasta and [ __ ] uh after that I forgot that news they told us okay you have to stay in your house and so then you're essentially stuck in your house for a long time and we hear on the news like you know we hear burgeoning of like oh they're gonna open next week and then next week comes around and we're not open and then what I remember hearing I think the thing that like struck me the most is after several weeks of being told like you know oh guys don't worry you get out next week we hear like oh yeah ten thousand troops from the military have rolled in to try and stop people from trying to leave their house and that's kind of really when it hits when you're like oh [ __ ] you know we're stuck here for a while so then after that you just you're stuck in your house for weeks on end I mean I was doing school online already but then every everything everything shuts down um I remember a few weeks after the the military rolled in the compounds started doing these things called group deliveries which is basically if you like gather the people from your compound you can order like 40 bags of specific food you know like you communicate with all your with all the people in your company you go okay guys like we're gonna order this much and then they send like a big truck and they bring that the alternative if you're lucky enough to have that is that aside from that the government is giving you quote unquote food deliveries right which is you we would get it about once a week but it was like shaky when it would arrive or if it would arrive at all so it's essentially a cardboard box with whatever food they decided to give you that time and it was really poorly organized ideally you're supposed to receive like you know meat bread red rice fruits and veggies but you know there was one week where my compound was just delivered like 40 bags of banana 40 bags of bananas it's it's really like everyone's scrambling they're just trying to like put out as much food as they can um and they just don't I guess I don't know it's a lot of red tape I assume I heard like people got like you know a can of spam for households of like four to five people for like a week it's it's it's really not ideal conditions I guess when things started slowly reopening after you know weeks of effectively being starved we were thankfully enough me and the people I was close to were fine but you could see on the news people more in town were like trying to force them force their way out I heard that the suicide rate like increased incredibly because you know people were essentially devoid of resources and you know some buildings didn't have running water and you can't like the plumbers can't leave their houses to come fix your stuff so you're just stuck if anything breaks it's broken after weeks of that we kind of got like our first hint of reopening which would be um if you're in a green zone so that means you're re you're like Regional sub District within the city had zero cases from the beginning to now then you were allowed to leave between 2 and 5 PM one person per house Jesus yeah no it's insane one of those times that we were allowed to leave I was the one who got out so I was like I was driving around up and down the road and it is empty like you know you see all those pictures online of you know oh it's China it's like roads packed with people packed with cars it's like densely populated as hell and then I'm just going up and down this road and I like I can do I think it's the first time in two years that I'd been able to like do a full 360 and not see a human being it's insane I say that a lot but um it's it's it's genuinely just an astonishing moment to not see people for the first time in years it genuinely felt like the apocalypse because there was like piles of garbage because the garbage hadn't really been collected in certain areas there was like feral cats on the streets and feral animals on the streets because there was no humans to keep them in check it felt like 28 Days Later and then I remember because you know your your district is allowed to leave but you have to stay within your district and so because of that I was going down the road and I decided to see like okay what is technically stopping me from like driving to the middle of the city or whatever because you know I have great ideas you know pushing the buttons of this massive government that's kept me locked in my house for several weeks let's see how far they'll let me go so I drive down the road and I eventually see just this wall of blue and I'm like oh what's that maybe it's like a construction fence maybe it's a detour and I go and it's these big blue barricades that it it looked like something that you'd see it like a riot that like protesters put up it's like these blue barricades and then in front of it is like the bear kids are like stuck together with like wire fencing and like barrels and just kind of it's just a pile of stuff to stop you from Crossing into the next district and you go there and it just you look down and it just goes for a long time I I don't quite understand the infrastructure that must be required to sort of like hold people like cattle effectively to just keep them in a place so effectively another thing that I guess struck me when I got out was for obviously to make sure nobody was outside is the the cops the Dark Souls enemies had been allowed to you know drive around or be outside this whole time and I remember seeing like five cop cars lined up just on the side of the road which is rare because like I said the the cops here don't really drive cars and so there's like five cop cars lined up and they were just chilling because they're you know nobody's gonna try and leave you know what this government does to people nobody was going to test it except me because my prefrontal lobe probably wasn't developed great but um and these guys were just chilling it reminded me of that one Top Gear episode where there was the ghost cities and they just drag race the cops because the cops don't have anything to do and so you see these people that like have been essentially hired by this government to Wrangle human beings and for the first time since pretty much the history of China maybe not the history of China I'm exaggerating but for the first time in a long time these police officers just don't have anything to do you can see they're like leaned up against the cars like you know cops cop show style and they're just kind of talking it's a Trippy feeling that first time when like you know you know that it would be illegal to leave for a long time and then you kind of drive past the cops and it's that feeling when you're on the highway and you see a cop and you know you're going the speed limit but you still get that feeling of like oh [ __ ] what if he pulls me over it was that magnified with the power of Tiananmen Square you know yeah nothing anybody was doing was at all to that degree but it was magnified by just the it definitely feels like I should not be allowed to be doing this it feels strange to think that like billions of people have effectively had this way of thinking I guess bred into them that sounds weird um have this way of thinking like sort of ingrained into them that you know yeah this you know there is cops everywhere there is cameras everywhere you just do what they tell you I've said this a lot but it feels genuinely dystopian a lot of the media in the United States gets a lot of things wrong about China especially in like how totalitarian it is but for that first time since I got here and you know bear in mind I'm a I'm a staunch post-left Anarchist I'm not a fan of the government regardless of what country it is but for the first time since I had essentially gotten here to China because I got here and I was like huh I mean it's not as bad as like people say for the first time in such like a long time I realized like I felt like your 65 year old uncle on Facebook with the selfie in the truck and the glasses being like these damn these damn media they're gonna turn this into China where you can't go outside for several months on end but it was true you know it felt strange to to kind of to feel them I sound like a propaganda TV show I say might in a negative way it felt strange to feel the might of the Communist Party it felt strange to just be like you know to be an ant in this kind of ecosystem of politics a lot of people on the left like far left actually kind of like I think they call them tankies are like the people that justify like the Chinese and Russian government's actions even though just because they're not America like what do you think of that a boy uh you've opened a can of worms but um essentially this is this is a kind of a I mean it's leftist infighting but in my eyes it's Justified tankies is the the correct term you know a lot of the the more libertarian side of leftism so that's to say anarchism sort of like Democratic socialism that kind of stuff there was kind of a rift that happened a bit before the second world war but especially after the second world war and during the Cold War during the Cold War and kind of post-red scare there was this Rift that happened so this is more like the far left not like the progressive left that we think of today yeah um and even then in terms of far left it's that uh it's the it's the authoritarian side of the scale those who idealized the workings of Marx and that kind of stuff specifically Lenin's stuff so those who sort of believed in the USSR after the second world war and during the Cold War it kind of split because people realized oh you know maybe the Utopia that we had all been working for is now corrupt right people realized hey the USSR is effectively a a totalitarian state and that's when you got that Rift where you realize people are where you you kind of ended up with that Rift of I'm speaking with bias here which is impossible to remove because you know I'm a human being but you have these people that effectively believed okay we should you know abandon ship the USSR and communist China are not leftism anymore they've become totalitarianism and then from there you also ended up with people that at least in my eyes were so ingrained in that way of thinking that they were not yet disillusioned or if they were not ever disillusioned there's that side of lessism that sort of believes in the ideas of left of them and then those that believed in the uh I guess the interpretations of leftism yeah like the states that were available that said they were leftist at the time yeah pretty much you have people that followed the ideas and people that followed the states I guess as an anarchist you know I definitely lean towards Society not lean I'm all the way down towards the side of um communist China and the USSR are a failed State not a failed state in the geopolitical sense but in terms of I guess leftist Doctrine yeah I'm glad that we're putting this at the end of the video because like otherwise people are gonna get pissy at me like the people that watch oh yeah and they're gonna make you goddamn Kami I am saying my things if you feel like getting mad at me get mad at me send me the death threats I've already heard them uh you know don't get pissed in the comments after that this guy I appreciate it and it's really interesting to hear someone who understands the theory that that China is claiming that they know talk about how hey this is [ __ ] terrifying either way like it's still scary yeah and even then I don't believe in what China claims to believe in the first place and even then I'm able to sort of see past the veil of like hey this is not what we're supposed to be doing did you read the book like is that their thing oh um supposedly you know quote unquote yeah yeah personally I believe in post-left anarchism which is a very niche in a very radical side of anarchism that just believes that I won't give you this annoying like super long spiel but I guess I should probably clarify the common misconception that I've had to explain this like hundreds of times at this point but the idea that anarchism means absolute chaos and the absence of rules is at its core untrue I'm talking to you um the concept that anarchy means complete chaos and that those who believe in anarchism just want you know the world to burn is intrinsically false and if you were to look into the actual theories behind it you would see that this is neither what we are attempting to complete nor what we have ever attempted to complete anarchism at least the most common way to go about it believes in liberation for all people regardless of anything through the the direction of class Warfare and direct action against a centralized state which is a bunch of fancy ways to say we don't want people to be starving to death because some guy wants to make money so it's like the opposite of totalitarianism effectively yeah it believes I say it believes because my beliefs are a bit more Fringe and out there I'm I'm Gonna Get You know people on the right mad at me in the comments and now I'm gonna get maybe anarchists mad at me in the comments for not giving the correct interpretation but here's at least my perspective and my beliefs as to what the most I guess General interpretation of anarchism is uh it's the belief that the power of the state should be greatly reduced so at most it should be government not in the form of Nations but governments in the form of maybe like towns or cities or smaller sub-districts like that that are able to act independently and the integrate elements of direct democracy in order to sort of go about decision making so that would be voting in the sense that everybody's vote counts for one or everybody's vote is equal and obviously that's that's easier to do when you have a smaller area I identify myself as an insurrectionist which basically believes that that sort of I guess school of thought believes that you know we've expended all the other options anarchism has existed for hundreds of years and you know the revolution is not coming and therefore Liberation should be achieved through uh repeated undying and continuous Rebellion I guess in any form okay you've had your chance to explain post-left anarchism it was actually interesting but I can't let you go any further because people are gonna think I'm giving you propaganda time I really appreciate it yeah okay true these are my opinions not his I'm uh I'm I'm just kind of a massive nerd and you know what I appreciate it and thank you for talking about this it's been really interesting to hear about what China has been doing tell me a story I wanna hear it I think it's boring but I'm interested tell me a story I want to hear it you know I think it's boring but I'm interested

Channel: Azeal

Views: 117,232

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Id: 5B8uSUaYcDk

Length: 26min 38sec (1598 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 04 2022