I Never WANTED to be on Chinese TV but I had no Choice!

I absolutely can't stand being on Chinese TV I'm gonna tell you guys why in a minute so this feels like deja vu I've been spending the morning walking up and down bridges being followed around by a crew from the CCTV which is China China Central Television it doesn't mean closed-circuit TV and basically what's been happening is they've been doing this documentary about China opening up with a 40 year anniversary of China's reforms which of course Shenzhen is a huge part of that but the thing is they've already spent an entire day with me and we went all over the place this was about a month ago and we went to an urban village and I showed them around spent the morning sweating my ass off because it's so hot here and I'm always wearing my suit and I'm pretty sure you can tell I'm sweating because I've been walking around all morning and then we went into hodjam Bay and went to go and see some of the vendors and I spoke to some people I know there showed them around and so it was actually uh it's pretty complete but you know they need stuff to finish things off so now they want me walking around in a park and they also want me to show them how I do editing on my laptop and things like that so I'm just wrapping this up the problem is I've got to fly off to Taiwan this evening and so it's it's all very short notice and it's it's demanding and I just wanted to go over the way things work here and explain to you why it's it's so ridiculous because I've got a thing against the the team that's with me the crew that's with me they're very nice they're just doing their job the cameramen are actually pro and that's something something I'm very surprised by in China is that you know they do pretty much everything on on Canon 5d Mark 3 is here for TV strangely enough like all the TV stations just use 5d threes but they've got all the proper lenses and they've got the know-how and they know how to use them and you know you actually get a really good result a very professional looking result at the end and remember Chinese production standards aren't really very high so they don't need to worry about doing 4k or anything over 1080 let me get to the problems of all of this first of all I've been contacted by CCTV for them to make Wow it is hard for them to make videos about me for years now and they always contact me and they say hey we found out about you on the internet so we want to come do a story about you which is they've got this show called allow wide sides on wall which is um kind of like a feature show of foreigners living in China but they demand that they come and follow me for seven days they demand oh yeah we want to interview your wife or your girlfriend and your friends we want to go to your work with you we want to go into your house and watch you cook we want to do all these things which is incredibly invasive and on top of that they don't pay anything so they expect you to take a week out of your life show them around accomodate them and let them into all your privacy and expose yourself to a lot of potential harassment or daxing or whatever you want to call it for nothing but because China's media industry is still quite young and developing people are are willing to do this kind of thing because they just want to be on TV you know they want that little you know 15 minutes of fame but someone like myself I don't need those 15 minutes and I've had mine so you know it's not a very good proposal and so I've always refused okay well missions are to to lima okay so this is the crew behind me it consists of try and get them in there they're sick the producer the the woman over there is a producer we've got two cameramen there's a second guy and the other guys are kind of assistants who carry the lenses and carry the stuff around anyway back to what I was saying so I've always kind of refused this especially a person in my position I can't allow people to know too much about me because another part of you know Cece being CCTV in the government is they ask you a lot of very uncomfortable and they also put a lot of stipulations like you may not mention this you may not mention that you know what these are you on and they start to dig into all this stuff which you know I've got nothing to hide but at the same time I feel very uncomfortable letting everybody know all these very personal details about me especially the you know the the government TV station so yeah I've always refused now the reason I've decided to take this particular project on is simply because it's about Jen Jen and Jen Jen is my city and I love Schengen and there's no doubt about it I think Schengen is the best city in China so I thought this would be a good idea to help promote Jen Jen a little bit and also maybe give a bit of a positive image you know to what I do because you know there's a fairly negative image of me out there and the Chinese internet although it's changed lately strangely enough I think it's because people pirated our conquering northern China and conquering southern China and very famous wave war like Internet star and the reason he's an Internet stars because he pirates documentaries and movies and puts them online it's interesting you can become a star for being an open pirate anyway so this guy pirated our two documentaries and he wrote a glowing review and he kind of analyzed it and took little chunks out of it and said showed like how how cooler was that we were showing the culture and that we were really like trying to show the rest of the world you know what China's culture is all about so it was a was positive so a lot of the hate kind of died down but at the same time it doesn't hurt to have a little bit more positive PR and that's why I'm going through this process of ridiculousness and now I'm going to complain a little bit because this is serpens a day and you not going to get away without a complaint and my complaint is just what they expect from you you know they did expect the whole thing they so I just think it's kind of interesting I'll keep the dancers in the background I think it was some one of those things where they did ask to speak to my wife and come to my work and come to my house and stuff and I just I just pretty much point-blank refused and I said no sorry you know that's not how it goes you're more than welcome to come with me in as I film and we go outside and you know talk about gin gin and stuff but that's about as far as it goes but then they started to demand a whole bunch of other stuff so we spent an entire day and I wanted to do some other things right I had to cut it off but I did make sure that they got all they wanted and when I say a full day I mean I met them at 7 a.m. and I only left at about 11 p.m. so we did a lot of filming that day and yeah see I'm it's it's cool though I'm busy being filmed again and then basically what happened next is I got you know a message to say that they needed to film some more stuff today well not today they wanted to film I told them I'm going to Taiwan to do all this a TV China stuff and so they had to try and find a time which happens to be today but again they put a whole list of things that they would like to do and it's just not possible for us to cover so many things in a day including they wanted me to have a party where I meet with other foreigners and other foreign friends here in Tianjin which I'm not very good at throwing parties in the first place but to to do that on a days notice is actually really quite difficult so you know I I just couldn't do that and then they said ok how about when you get back from Taiwan when are you coming back so tell them the date and they're like no that's too far away how about you make your trip shorter how about you come back earlier and I was like no that's taking a lot of time and planning and getting visas and stuff I'm not gonna cancel that that quickly so anyway I just wanted to point out that the the list of demands are high but the rewards are nothing I'm not getting paid the exposure is not gonna help me in any financial way the only thing is going to help is perhaps a slightly more positive image on the Chinese internet and of course I'm kind of doing it for my my Chinese parents in law as well if they see me on TV think that they'll be they'll be happy to see that so you know that's that's actually my main sort of motivating factor here anyway guys I've got to get back to filming I've got a whole day of this stuff ahead of me and then I got a rush off to Taiwan tonight so I'll be catching you guys in the ATV China videos which are going to be fantastic cannot wait for you to see them and until next time you know the drill as always stay awesome [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: serpentza

Views: 265,253

Rating: 4.8415618 out of 5

Keywords: CCTV, Chinese Central TV, Chinese central television, Chinese government, Government minder, china how it is, winston sterzel, living in china, life in china, cultural differences, cultural difficulties, foreigners in china, travel vlog, societal issues, beijing china, Serpentza, state media, communism, communist china, sesame credit, sesame credit score, sesame credit in china, sesame credit black mirror, sesame credit 2018, state control, life in china 2018

Id: z9zFXffyDXk

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 11 2018