I was Interrogated and Detained by Chinese Special Police - NO BS

yes over the course of two days a chinese swat team a special police investigator a communist party leader and the chinese people liberation army detained me tried to get information from me tailed me and ultimately tried to disappear me china's rabid nationalists are in fact the people who hurt china the most it's actually incredibly difficult to show china in a positive light when you have these hateful forces constantly acting against you after successfully self-funding my first documentary in 2015 which saw myself and my friend see milk go through all of the southern provinces in china and explore on our homemade motorcycles we were just really rearing to do the next one we couldn't wait to explore the north in the same way where we just ride randomly around go and find interesting things talk to local people interact and completely unscripted just go out there and see what's there i mean of course we have to find points of interest but beyond that we really just wanted to go out and have fun and show the world really what china's all about in order to ensure that we didn't waste our time or anyone else's time we decided to perhaps organize this documentary a little better and to do so we were going to find fixers for different provinces we'd find somebody local in whichever province we're going to visit who could point us in the right direction of something interesting perhaps arrange for us to go and meet someone interesting arrange for us to go to a north korean restaurant for instance or to go and see some tribes in the middle of inner mongolia there were all these well-laid plans but of course we had to go find fixers and we did we found wonderful very accommodating people usually locals from whichever area who had great knowledge of where we were going and were able to tell us about some of the cool things we should check out which we did my producer rick and the second producer cameraman mark are both british based out of beijing they've worked for some of the big chinese tv and radio people like cri chinese radio international etc and they have a long resume of going around china and filming state fluff pieces and this kind of thing and so they're used to always having someone along who can translate for them because you know they work for these different um media outlets the difference is this time it was up to myself and c milk to do all the chinese speaking and arranging because neither of these two could speak chinese at least not well enough to organize anything so cmilk actually organized our contact for inner mongolia it's a guy who would visit who is a mongolian himself in a mongolian who would visit these tribes once a year and there there's so many different tribes it's very hard to find because they're out in the middle of nowhere and they move around being nomadic of course and so we were going to go and check out uh a tribe that herded camels and made sort of camel milk stuff and what have you we were going to go and you know build a uret and live in a yurt and and all that kind of thing and then we were going to move on to a guy who herded horses wild horses around in mongolia and it was going to be fantastic we couldn't wait to explore the different cultures show the world exactly what china is all about the diversity of the culture especially in the minority areas and everything was you know all in good faith and very good and happy and on track so this guy this fixer that we found could not speak english and here's where the problem came in we needed our producers to coordinate with our fixer and since we weren't available 24 hours a day to do so they asked this fixer if he knew anyone that could speak english and he did he had a friend in beijing who could speak english and chinese a chinese national and so this guy acted as kind of a go-between what we didn't know at the time is that this guy was a rabid nationalist and this is what caused all of our problems along the way so we've been on the road for weeks now and we've just gone through a grueling situation on the border of north korea where things had been very hairy a couple of times we'd met north koreans uh there's footage that will never make it into the documentary which we just have to sit on because we got into a situation where people's lives were at risk so you know maybe more on that later in the future the fact of the matter is we just come from north korea the border of north korea and we've been writing and writing and it was about time for us to meet our fixer and the translator because we were paying for them to fly out and meet us they were going to take us to these tribes and show us what's going on and the day before we were supposed to meet them in hilar they kind of went radio silent so we were asking hey what's up what's going on and we get a message saying oh our flight was canceled and we took a look and there was no weird weather there was nothing about flights being cancelled so we said all right no problem we will book you another one and then we had radio silence now this was a day before we were supposed to meet these guys remember we were counting on these guys to take us to see these tribes this was our end these were our fixers and it was incredibly frustrating so we just sent a whole bunch of messages and we got a reply back finally saying that they decided they are not going to come to meet us and when we asked why they pointed us to a video on yoko now guys of course if you've been watching my videos as of late you'll know that i am very critical of the ccp and the chinese government and a lot of the societal problems within china and that is because i have left china and i'm free to speak about these things now when living in china i was not free to talk about these things obviously for various reasons and at the time of filming this documentary i still had not begun to be critical of china the thing is there are these very fragile and immature and insecure nationalists the rabid nationalists of china who if you even say the slightest thing that somehow they perceive as being anti-china for instance if i'm walking on a street in one of my vlogs and i say well someone spits behind me and i say look that's an unfortunate part of chinese society as people spit a lot on the streets all of a sudden i'm anti-china we're not just pointing out actual facts which are demonstrable through my videos themselves anyway what had happened was people had started to take our videos from adv china and translate them and put them up on billy billy and yoko and so on but in order to push their narrative they had put chinese subtitles incorrect chinese subtitles to paint us in an incredibly bad light and remember the majority of people in china that are watching these videos their understanding of english is either zero or very poor so they just believe what's being written in the subtitles so we'd be walking around in our videos saying like you know look this street food is absolutely delicious but you gotta watch out because you can get food poisoning and the subtitles would say something like all chinese food is dangerous and will give you food poisoning so you know it was a painting an incredibly negative picture of us and these guys had watched well not these guys the the nationalist translator guy had watched some of these badly translated things and had bought into it hookline and sinker so he said a message he sent a message to us saying uh we don't believe in what you guys are doing so we're not gonna help you now at this point that really just left us hanging on the day on the day before we were supposed to meet them there's no way we would be able to find these tribes by ourselves we needed a guide so we had already paid them money we'd already paid for the plane tickets and everything they'd already taken cash from us etc so we said to them listen you've really left us hanging at least at least give us the location of these guys we'll go find them ourselves we'll try to figure something out so he obliged and sent us kind of very random directions of how to get there you know go down this road you'll see a dirt road drive for about 15 kilometers and you'll see something you know on the right etc but it was better than nothing and we took his directions and said sorry we can work together pity things couldn't work out and we kind of just left it at that so the next day we were expecting that everything would be okay we're riding along on our bikes through these beautiful landscapes of inner mongolia where you just see grasslands as far as the eye can see we kind of figure out where we're going and we actually did eventually find the first camp it was very difficult to communicate because the occupants could not speak mandarin chinese very well because they spoke mongolian and although in china within the borders of mainland china the government decrees that everybody has to learn to speak mandarin the actual reality is that a lot of people don't so we were kind of struggling with their broken mandarin and our mandarin and you know they couldn't speak english but eventually the old guy the old mongolian guy got his daughter on the phone and she told us because she could speak mandarin that they had been warned about us that we were going to come and make fun of them and paint them in a bad light and you know say their culture is [ __ ] and things like that which of course was shocking to us because that's the exact opposite of what we were doing we were going out of our way to this very far away place in the middle of nowhere to show people how interesting and valuable their culture is so it was a you know kind of a stab in the chest we did eventually through talking to the daughter smooth things out we showed him our footage from conquering southern china to placate him and reassure him that we were there to show the world how interesting china's culture is and how interesting their culture is and everything was fine we went out chasing camels it was one of the most interesting experiences of my life literally just riding into the middle of nowhere you see nothing on the horizon no buildings no roads anything just through this grass massive grassland looking for camels and you see some specks in the distance and you go there and you find them and we actually herded camels all the way back to where the follow car was stuck and we filmed our whole thing for conquering northern china it was a wonderful experience so that was uh the first little clue that something was incorrect but it got far worse than that the second day after spending the night in the yurts and i've got to say it was pretty uncomfortable sleeping in a yurt not going to do that again anytime soon we were going to go to the only town in the area that allowed foreigners to stay now i want you to listen very closely here do not believe people that tell you that as a foreigner you can just travel around china and stay where you want it's not true there are many many towns and cities and even whole areas of provinces in fact even whole provinces where foreigners are not allowed to stay in hotels sometimes you're not even allowed into the area you'll be turned around at a checkpoint or you know at the highway exit china still has a very very tight grip on who and what can go into certain areas and having traveled around through rural china on my motorcycle with my friends in the past and just solo as well i have very often come across a situation where i try to book into a hotel and i'm told right to my face sorry foreigners are not allowed to stay here it's a real thing and it's actually led to me having to sleep on the side of the road in some cases and sometimes ride through the night to find a city that has a foreign friendly hotel usually if there's a minority area they don't want foreigners staying there that's one of the reasons because they don't want anyone to see what's going on with the minorities perhaps there's some repression going on perhaps there's some uprisings or some kind of thing they just don't want that kind of information leaving china and that's one of the reasons for sure another one of the reasons is there may be something militarily important nearby they don't want foreigners anywhere nearby it's quite scary and sometimes when you go into some of these towns and situations everyone looks at you very suspiciously people get on their phones and start calling the local i don't know police or something about you to snitch on you it does happen and it's happened many times where there's a phone call and next minute they've got there's cops or military coming to check us out in fact one time we were traveling through hunan we were spotted in one area and questioned by some plainclothes police and for the rest of our trip through hunan on that big road this g-road we were taking they had pla people stationed in all the little towns that they knew we were going through who would see us and write down in a notepad as we drove past it is still a big part of china don't believe this like oh lonely planet let's go to the great wall stuff because that's fine but when you get into rural china it's different so what i'm trying to get at here is there was only one town with one hotel that was allowing foreigners to stay in it in between the camel guys and the horse guys you could search everywhere but unfortunately every other hotel foreign is not allowed you're only allowed to go to this one hotel in this one little town so that's where we went but of course our nationalist friend back in beijing who despised our guts and was trying to sabotage us the whole way knew that that was the only place we could stay so this is where the big the first big incident happened we'd arrived in the city we'd unpacked all our gear we were copying footage from the night before and i kind of suspected that things might go wrong at some point so what i had been doing up until that point is every time we backed up a hard drive from a day or whatever is we would ship it back using a courier to beijing and uh if we hadn't shipped the footage back if it was only half copied or something we're doing backups we had one in the hotel room and then we'd have a second one i would take that second back up and i would put it on my bike underneath the battery cover in in a ziploc bag basically so that it was weather protected and it was also kind of away from our main camera gear and stuff just in case things were confiscated and deleted because i know that happens in china so things started out great we checked into the hotel we unpacked all our gear put everything in the hotel rooms we went out had an awesome dinner walked around the town spoke to the locals just had a good time a bunch of beers that kind of thing and we went back to the hotel and we all decided that we're going to chill out in our producers room all of us so we got together and we were watching a movie on uh the laptop and the next thing and this is late at night it's kind of 11 11 30 at night um we get this kind of massive big knock on the door and bam in busts a swat team a proper chinese swat team with body armor on you know swat tur jin is which is like special police written on their uniforms and stuff all big tall burly guys and uh we were taken aback we were like okay what's going on here now of course i've had experiences in the past staying in hotels in rural areas where the police have come to check on me because like i said they keep a very close eye on foreigners in these rural areas and they'll come and check your papers and things like that and they always come very late at night because that's they know you're going to be you know in the hotel room at midnight um such is a communist country so the first thing that happened is they separated our chinese driver away from us and took him into another room to interrogate him because we had a chinese driver is actually a relative of one of our producers girlfriends um and then they lined us up took our photo got all our papers they wanted to see all of our passports our driver's licenses you know everything that we had and of course they were taking photos of all of that next they wanted to see all of our equipment so all of our cameras had to be laid out they wrote down the serial numbers of all of our cameras of all of our equipment and they demanded to see everything in our bags and all that to be taken out and all that sort of thing and uh you know it was kind of unnerving in fact it was incredibly unnerving to be honest um and while this was all happening a lady turned up she was a special police investigator and she could speak english well bad english but she could speak english nonetheless and she definitely wasn't from the local area she had been sent in from beijing and this was when things started to get a lot more serious she started to interrogate us as if we had broken the law she wanted to know who was paying us she wanted to know who was funding us why we were filming these things and of course our entire story about filming these things the whole time has been look we're just filming our travel we want to show the interesting parts of chinese culture you know this is what we're doing she demanded to see footage so we showed her all the footage that we had luckily the majority of the footage especially all the north korean stuff and all that had already been shipped back to beijing the thing is the footage that we did show her was just from the previous day and all it was was camels and drone footage of camels and stuff and uh you know us hanging out with the inner mongolian guys uh drinking camel milk and what have you so there's nothing incriminating or weird there not that there was any way throughout our entire thing except some of the north korean stuff of course and uh she kept wanting to see it over and over again and kept asking what is your website who's paying you and we showed her our conquering southern china documentary page on imdb and stuff and we showed her look this is this is what we're doing and we kept showing her that but she kept saying where is your website i don't want to see this where is your website where is your website we kept showing her this over and over again didn't know what she was saying so she went uh out and came back again with a party member this big tall fat lumbering you know communist party official who's the head of the communist party for that area you can always tell a communist party official because they're always wearing a polo shirt with a big pot belly and his pants up to his navel with like a bunch of keys on his belt and a specific haircut and about 10 000 cigarettes that he'll smoke in a minute that's how you tell anyway the fact of the matter is he starts asking questions which he's then translating in this all along the same lines it keeps going back to who's funding you who's paying you you know it's very unnerving when you've got communist party officials special police investigators and a swat team detaining you in your room demanding that you tell them who you're who are you working for and who's paying you anyway we hear them go out into the corridor and she starts speaking chinese to this party member and we hear specifically her say these are the guys we were told about we need to find out what their channels are and obviously referring to our youtube channels she says to the communist party guy i've got a vpn back at the office let's go and investigate so then they come back in ask us a bunch more questions want to see our passports again want to see our driver's licenses again want to see all that paperwork again take down all of our serial numbers and stuff they were incredibly interested in the fact that we had a drone now it's not illegal to fly a drone in this area of china in fact dji comes from china and they've got a very robust mapping system and if you try to take off in an area that is actually forbidden to fly you cannot take off we were just following the rules we had our our proper license to fly the thing you know we went we went through everything we made sure that we were okay before this trip so they couldn't really nail us even though they kept saying like why do you have this what's the reason for you having this we kept showing this camel footage of you know this this beautiful shot that we had of the camels running through the the grasslands and stuff and it seemed to kind of placate them kind of anyway so they left us alone this was after around three hours of being detained our driver was also being you know individually interrogated in the other room because he was chinese and he was very shaken up by all this of course he couldn't speak a word of english this guy by the way he's 100 percent chinese guy um so they left us no this was now getting close to i think it was about one two in the morning and i said to the guys listen they're gonna come back she said she's gonna go and investigate we need to get out of here and i was i was kind of doing the planning for the navigation and the routes and stuff during this trip um because i'd been on so many of these motorcycle trips and stuff in the past so i said let's pack everything right now let's get everything into the car and we're going to leave at 4 00 am so that's what we did we packed everything into the car 4 am we were out of there okay because they were going to come back 100 gonna come back and we just didn't know when so off we went and we drove until we found the um horse guy okay now we thought that perhaps we were okay but we just wanted to get this over with and get out of the province if we could as soon as possible because we knew more trouble would be coming if we hang around but we get to the horse guy we sit down and uh really cool guy he kind of looks like psy from gang gangnam style you know that it is the most bizarre looking guy but he was very cool and we all sat down we kind of did our introductions in his yurt and then he pulls out his big knife because you know all these mongolian guys have a knife it's a traditional thing to pass down from your father to your son type thing and while we're doing that he says my friend called me and said that you are going to come and make fun of us here you're going to come and sabotage us and all this and we thought come on not this again so we had to explain to this guy again listen this is not the case we really just want to show your culture etc etc we showed the footage of conquering southern china to him so that he could see the reason we're there is to show off the interesting diverse culture of china and you know to celebrate what they do and that kind of thing and if you watch conquering northern china you'll see but i gotta be honest with you it was tough for us to film this stuff by now because we're trying to show china in a positive light but all that's happening to us is negative stuff so after this rather tense situation we explained our way out of it things were okay again we hopped on our bikes we followed him out into the grasslands we found these wild horses we herded them back you know there was that whole funny scene of me actually being pulled over by a small horse and uh it was a lot of fun to be honest this guy was fantastic all of the people we met in that particular camp were top notch very nice friendly people but of course what didn't help our image with them anyway is halfway through us doing all of this the chinese pla arrives so we're at the car busy getting some more gear because we're going to go and film something else we're actually going to film eating a goat which had just been cooked right we're about to film this and the pla turns up in their sort of whatever they are these land rover type things and they jump out a whole bunch of soldiers jump out and their sort of leader general guy or whatever shouts at us in a very condescending typical authoritarian tone you know pull out your papers so great now we have to go through this again lines us all up against our car takes photos of us checks our passports checks our driver's licenses you know the usual stuff all of our papers we explain to him what's going on the mongolian guy actually and his family you know come to them and say look we're just filming this and that the next thing kind of can't calm them down a little bit and then they um seem to be okay still incredibly mean and rude to us the whole time and they give us our passports back and all that kind of thing they hop in their cars start to drive out stop just when everyone thinks everything's okay stop reverse jump out and the general guy says open your car take out all of your bags open all of your bags so like great okay this again now by this time i happen to be the only guy left standing at the car because the the other guys have kind of picked up the hint and they'd buggered off somewhere to the yurt or whatever to try and get away or behind the fence and stuff so now they were telling me to unpack everything and i was like oh great so i've got all these soldiers around me getting me to unpack our cars they checked all the serial numbers of our cameras they checked inside all of our bags what's this what's this what's this they found the drone and then it was a big thing again with like why do you have this here etc etc i had to show them on my phone the footage of the camels again and then they found our bag with our hard drives now we have these lacy hard drives um should actually have one here now wait now we have these lacy hard drives this is what we were using because they're rugged we bought a bunch of these before the trip because we knew we were going to be going through all these like sort of random areas and we needed something to be tough so we bought a bunch of these and this is what we were backing our footage up on so he found a bag full of these which had our previous days recordings and a bunch of other things and he was like what are those so i said to them they're just diembale you know which is a as everybody knows is a powerbank right because they kind of do look like powerbanks to the untrained eye and i even like took one and i plugged my you know showed plug it into my phone type thing and then he was like okay whatever and then close the bag that was a huge dodge over there because if they seen those they would want to go through all their footage and stuff so it was really quite a wreck so after they'd searched everything the guy said to me we're coming back later that's what he said to me we're coming back later and then they all got into their you know military vehicle and buggered off by this time i just had enough everybody had enough we knew that this was getting incredibly serious so we very quickly filmed the last scene which was us eating that goat that gets cooked inside of itself which is a fantastic scene and a very interesting thing that they do in inner mongolia but i got to tell you guys that we were under duress the fact that we still managed to pull off filming that and didn't just get out of there it just shows you how dedicated we were to actually finishing this documentary and showing everybody the positive sides of china even though we were under so much negative stress and hatred from the chinese government which was led on by this stupid rabid nationalist anyway so we finished the scene we hopped in our car we hopped on our bikes and we got the hell out of there and didn't look back we left the province we didn't stop riding until it was dark and we'd gotten out of inner mongolia because once you leave that province yes of course there's inter-provincial stuff but obviously that was a sensitive area and found out later that of course there's a lot of um well there are a lot of uprisings and stuff because it turns out that inner mongolians a lot of them don't like being suppressed by the chinese government and they actually want their own identity which they're not really allowed to have so they have these occasional uprisings and terrorist attacks and things like that so it is a sensitive area which is you know just made our problems a lot worse so we left the area and that wasn't the last of the pla or the other nonsense that we came across on the trip but that was the end of that very scary situation so i've got something to say at the end of the day china's worst enemy in fact are the rabbit nationalists and the ccp who controls and condones their behavior china needs the world a lot more than the world needs china the rest of the world liberated china from war poverty and helped raise the people of china out of poverty through investment aid trade deals love charity and goodwill and frankly by putting up with a lot of [ __ ] and bad behavior on the part of the communist party a lot of it was motivated by greed for sure but greed or not it's still the rest of the world that lifted china out of the poverty stricken mess that china was before 1980 more on this in a future video if that piece of [ __ ] nationalist had not tried to sabotage us and get us detained and arrested disappear deported whatever he was trying to do we would have had a much more positive and better experience we would have filmed more in inner mongolia we would have put more positive vibes about china out to the world but because of that hateful little turd i'm afraid a lot of the good will that i had towards china is lost and this one person is indicative of china's changing attitude by and enlarge towards foreigners the kind of hateful attack comments that you see on our videos the kind of rhetoric that you see online these days of the way the chinese nationalists talk about foreigners in the foreign world it shows a shift in the past all of my wonderful experiences in the rural parts of china with some of the most amazing and hospitable people i've ever met would have allowed me to forgive and ignore the actions of this nationalist turd but unfortunately these days he is becoming the majority thank you very much for watching guys i can't wait to see in the next one and as always you know the drill stay awesome

Channel: serpentza

Views: 400,449

Rating: 4.7695947 out of 5

Keywords: China, PLA, SWAT, Chinese special forces, Chinese special police, Chinese secret police, people's liberation army, chinanews, SerpentZA, Winston Sterzel, china how it is, communist party of china, moving to china, advchina, adv china, living in china, conquering southern china, laowhy86, China Uncensored, cmilk, us china, move to china, detained in China, Arrested in China, Interrogated in China, adv podcasts, conquering northern china, working in china, china vlog, china podcast

Id: bq1Vgh_Ux34

Length: 30min 29sec (1829 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/FuzzballFury]

Nathan Rich says it better than I can.

[u/Allison_nt]

This dickhead alongside with laowhy86 are two most narcissistic and stinky individuals, just look at how they display their face on most of their thumbnails (

[u/dornish1919]

I cannot stand this asshole. His disgustingly bigoted narrative followed by the equally bigoted comments. Anyone heard of him?

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/Adrian_En]

I think in the beginning many of his Youtube videos weren’t that bad, just about his impressions about China as a foreigner, and it was not all negative. I never had the impression that he understands China well, but it was sometimes entertaining, and people who don’t know China well could still get some information about everyday life in China. But then he became more and more anti-Chinese and his later videos are garbage.

[u/Tumed]

Him: “I got interrogated and detained by Chinese police!!!”

Reality: One Chinese security guy asked him for ID

Him:”Chinese are racists and have a blind hatred for foreigners!!!”

Reality: One Chinese girl gave him a finger when he tried to flirt

Seriously some of these expats are so predictable it’s laughable

[u/Environmental-Data59]

It’s okay guys he has a Chinese wife

[u/MyStolenCow]

Seems like his early videos weren't all that bad, it was not super political, just showing life in a modern Chinese city (this was early 2010's) and that it was more or less just as good as the West (despite being less developed).

Then he started gaining a lot of subscribers, and it seems like he realize he makes far more money by being a "professional China hater" because that's what his Patron supporters want to hear.

Then after the US China trade war, Hong Kong riots, he started being openly anti China. I got a feeling CIA recruited him (like he is a South African, wife is Chinese, why is he living in USA, it is hard AF to get a random visa here), the tones of his videos changed completely.

[u/berenSTEIN_bears]

That's a sexpat. I think he's paid by the US gov actually. He worked with china uncensored which is falun gong, which is funded by the US. He got american citizenship somehow despite having no skills or education. I think it's a Trump Bannon thing.