Is China's "Progress" Worth It?

look that way yeah maybe a little up yeah a little up a little more up yeah that's probably okay let me a handycam it since that's our thing hey see Moke hello are you looking forward to our trip today do you want to be honest yes honest absolutely not why not it's Beijing level pollution it's humid it's dangerous on the road and I is there anything else to say it's a really bad place the pollution is absolutely terrible though I think that's been affecting us the most over here anymore I sure know if I was a real travel blogger what I'd say in the beginning right now is I can't wait to get on the road what a beautiful place this is gonna be fun yeah yeah yeah let's see about the people in the culture and all that yeah what we're going to do guys is we're gonna actually be quite real in this video we want to talk to you guys about this whole idea of progress and freedom sure so bear with us as we exit out of this parking garage very nice hotel by the way yes very nice data but just surrounded by pollution yes oh it's not good you guys will see in a sec yeah anyway I will see you on the road what do you see is a sign of progress like in a country or in a person I'd say in a country okay a sign of progress would be the crime dips yes people can live not in fear of you know rogue people stealing and looting right there's a semblance of of law enforcement and an order in society and people have a job you know unemployment is low so it's not about necessarily being like super wealthy or anything it's just that people are they haven't anyway yeah I would say progress would see people coming out of poverty being able to afford a better lifestyle yep you know health care issues not being big so in other words uh affordable and available healthcare for everybody pretty a socialist no I'm just joking I mean like for instance yeah I mean come on we just get out you look at this pollutions awful it's really awful now what I mean is I in Africa right right I know what poverty really looks like you know I know what progress looks like as well you know by progress I mean being able to live in a civilization where all the amenities are available at hand but if you got into the rural parts of Africa for instance right you don't find running water too hi-yah hi I'm a friend come on okay thank you okay let me get back to it is uh if you got into rural Africa you get situations where people have to literally walk miles everyday to get running well to get water right turn whether it be from a river or a pump or whatever and then they have to come back to their village or whatever so when you see those kinds of things start to change where people don't have to struggle just for the basic amenities in life that's what I call progress all right so what does that have to do with what we're looking at now that's the thing okay is that obviously Vietnam for most of his life or you know existence modern existence has been a very poor country right people didn't have enough people didn't have running water they didn't have enough food and they had war right that was that's not progress that's not a stable society however things have improved drastically and that's what happens is that sometimes people ignore some of the bigger you know elements that play kind of like the the air we're breathing that would make it I'm pretty sure made me quite sick very quickly yeah I've got a I've got a scratchy throat yeah ignoring these things in favor of you know a little bit of progress a little bit stability in their life a little bit of money in the pocket right the problem is I'm specifically going to address China in this and this is gonna be a very honest topic okay what happens is when you have nothing yeah when you have instability when you have civil war like China had yeah when you have a population that struggles to make ends meet then a top-heavy all-powerful authoritarian government that actually allows some sort of progress and money into the country now becomes a hero you know and it's not looked at from the outside kind of like what we're looking at with his pollution here right ignoring the elephant in the room in favor of just getting on with life because it's better than it was before right right and I think you know a lot of people a lot of people in China obviously get duped by this this is where you'll see a huge difference in opinion with Taiwanese versus mainlanders is because they've had a functioning democracy and they fought for it right right in that to get rid of that would be detrimental to their self-image of what they think is important because they've already had the amenities they've they haven't been starving in Taiwan right yeah they have all that stuff whereas in China it's too recent for them to be able to appreciate something like a Taiwanese democracy and they actually don't understand it yeah why wouldn't they want to come back to us yeah sure this is the problem is that now with all these shining cities and people have cars now in China all this stuff happens so quickly and they expect it right sure they expect this this new boom of wealth they expect all this money to come flowing into their pockets and then to be able to make a better life on when that's when that kind of stuff is the most important drive for a society and a people then they completely ignore how much power has been consolidated and control has been consolidated to where things can go bad because there's no checks and balances there's no actual func functioning real functioning government that actually cares about human rights people health care social services all that kind of stuff you mentioned the beginning of sure so what then when the economy slows down or things go a little bit pear-shaped people are people go apeshit right they go that's when that's when you know coos happen and that's when like things like Venezuela happen right so China is in a very unique position where I think the people think that because they're not as suffering as much as they were in the past that they're free and I think the West is duped into this because you look at we look at progress and we say China is improving look at all these buildings look at all this this money that's pouring in yeah look at the the people being lifted out of poverty right now that becomes oh they're kind of like us now they're right they're a free country but they're ignoring a massive massive thing that's actually happening in China right now I think oh yeah absolutely you know that's that's that is exactly what you said when you start to see oh look they have LV bags and they can right drive around and BMWs and Porsches and people are well-to-do hanging out in fancy restaurants and you know the people themselves actually don't realize how under control they are until something affects them personally that's a very Chinese thing you know it's over yeah phew sort of like just ignore everything else just to only focus on your little bubble right right right so what will happen is a lot of my Chinese friends weren't very badly with our peer to peer lending thing remember that so up until then they're like loved in China that agree love China we love the government look at what all the good things it's done for us but because it never actually affects them there's no like freedom problems for them because to be honest in China you can live a very free life it's just as if you're living in the West you know as long as you don't run afoul of the government in any way right right and in any way in any way so this is a very good example because now a lot of these people including my wife and people she knows they all got duped into this peer-to-peer lending scheme right it's a massive thing probably about a year ago and everybody thought it was a fantastic investment little startups would spring up everywhere and it's kind of like it was a system where you kind of crowd fund together someone wants to buy a car they need money to buy the car so they go to this an app whatever it's called it's all bunch of them back in the day and they lend the money from there and what happens is that money is everyone's investment money right and then they pay back they pay back with interest in that interest get splits amongst all the lenders so you know you you get fairly good returns on your investment there right of course it turns out to be just a massive pyramid scheme and then at the end of the day the government realized it was getting out of control and they put a whole bunch of rules in place and basically crashed the whole in the peer-to-peer learning scheme thing right and most of the companies had to close down that meant that everybody lost their investments because you know they ran away with the money and that sort of thing so long story short a lot of people were suddenly unhappy people that were like yes China's great we're making money were the most awesome freest brilliant nation in the world and all of a sudden they lose all this money and they're like okay well our awesome government will listen to us we're just gonna go protest and get our money back yeah except they found out the hard way that you can't do that in China I think a lot of Chinese people are duped when they see democracy on TV and say we don't care about that until they actually want it yeah and then they realize hey wait a minute I was duped because we have money now in China we have the cities and buildings but we can't do that no by the way let's just pull over I want to check the GPS sure I don't want us to go astray now what what happened with this peer-to-peer lending thing and the reason I'm talking about it is it affected my wife and it affected people that I know personally in China you know they're all part of these wiecek groups right that's not kind of communicating oh this is a good investment this is a bad investment so in these WeChat groups they started to kind of organize a protest like we're all gonna go to Beijing and we're going to go stand in front of the peoples the whole of the people or whatever yeah yeah demand that the government gets our money back from these scammers right yeah but then what started to happen is the people that we're kind of organizing this in the little group started getting visits from the police yeah started to like the police would show up and you know this is not the second third hand information this is you know I know people like that this happened too and they would basically say listen we know you're planning to go to this protests in Beijing but we're either going to detain you until the date is over so whatever for 10 15 days until the planned protest is over we're either gonna detain you or you can sign this paper to promise that you won't go you know another guy another situation was they went to they approached the the guy's employer and basically told the employer to convince their employee that if they go they're gonna lose their job you know that kind of here sneaky little basically what happened was this illusion of free awesome money-making let's just go ahead and have this fantastic society type thing got shattered for those people and immediately they started to see the kind of control that is asserted over their lives of course sure they lost their money they didn't get their money back that this infallible government that they believed in that was going to make sure that everything was going to be great did not step in to help them get their money back right right and in fact tried to detain them and force them not to go on protest so it really woke up a lot of people and that's why they were doing this that's why they were clamping down is because if too many people got together and complained and kind of did this thing then it could cause serious civil unrest right you know which happens often I have an example okay you remember when motorcycles were banned in hey Joe I do we're in that motorcycle group right yeah yeah all those guys with big bikes and they actually went into the law and proved that motorcycles are in fact legal and allowed on the highways right yeah now China likes to say that's not the case right but they found the law they went in there and really just broke it apart right yeah they got a council with the local government cuz in the Constitution the local governments allowed to make local laws right even though actually in reality it's not the case you know very minor things they're allowed to control anyway they they found the law they've got a council they they paid paid the freakin bribes to get an audience so did lawmakers right yeah yeah and where are you better I'm right behind you okay cool they got an audience with the lawmakers and at the end of it they spent about four months of this whole process right all these guys are wealthy so they're like we can pull this off right we want to make this better for riders nope because at the end of the day what happened was the guangzhou which is the government the the provincial government got wind of this and they're like no you can't do that if you don't if you pass this law and take this kind of appeal from these motorcycle riders then now Hawaii Joe's not gonna get funding for the roads yeah so then they're like well okay so yeah but I don't ever do this again and don't ever ask or tell anyone about this and there's stuff in the WeChat group there's posting all these legal documents and pictures and meeting with the government officials and stuff and I can imagine a lot of freaking faith was lost oh yeah when all of these laws and freedoms are promised to them in the constitution but in reality it's it doesn't work like that yeah I mean this talk of the Constitution being rolled back anyway censoring it from being able to be looked up online because it does guarantee freedom of religion but it goes against what they're doing it shins young right now yeah you know with all the detaining the Muslims this stuff so the yeah the whole idea freedom is scary to people when they finally need to do something about it yeah and needed something address or taken care of and you'll see a lot of this that's why there's a lot of unrest with medical treatment and stuff and killing doctors and going crazy with property and setting off fireworks and blowing up bulldozers and stuff because at the end of the day you actually can't really get help from the government no I'm going to extend this to foreigners as well yeah yeah how many foreigners do you know that trumpet the freedom of China and how amazing China is um pretty much everyone that gets there in the beginning absolutely I think 99% unless they've had a lot of experience in and around Asia 99% of foreigners to get to chance more free wow it's amazing it's freer than in in America Australia people can walk around on the streets at night they don't need a fear for their safety which is true but then they sort of go overboard and you get these zealots I mean as there are tons of them out there is absolute zealots who suddenly make themselves enemies of whichever country they came from basically in favor of China because they're like China's better and the best and they they basically shill its we did a whole episode of our ship is right there yeah now I still know a lot of people like that and that's because nothing bad has ever happened to them however I've got a story and this is a story that's very recent of how how that changes people's attitudes when something bad happens okay by the way slow down and let's get in the bike lane sure all right so there's a guy we know he won't mind me telling the story okay okay obviously not gonna mention his name or anything but he's been in China for a while and he's been very very sort of happy with his life in China he thinks it's awesome slow down did you like just going far away to opens any speed up yeah which we shouldn't be we should be just going at a normal rate here okay cool so no he absolutely was enjoying his life he had no problems and you know I used to sit at a couple drinks then one day and I was lamenting some of the you know the loss of freedoms but yeah middle school these kids in scooters is totally weird anyway looks like they're on e-bikes most of the nation yeah mighty ruin bikes yeah anyway and he'd be like now you're talking [ __ ] you're overreacting all this monsters okay kind of usual stuff yeah and recently he had to move out of China I'm not gonna say where he moved but he moved somewhere else in Southeast Asia okay and the reason this happened was okay he he screwed up okay he he overstayed his visa by like seven days no I know it's good okay so another thing is I don't overstay your visa but no no no the way the Chinese visas work the I think it was on a visitor's visa which is basically a tourist visa right depending on your nationality you get to stay a number of days but you have to leave and then come back so his one allows them to stay 90 days on you know here's a visa that's valid for ten years true but you can only stay 90 days and you have to leave China and then come back in all right I guess we just follow the science of Hanoi yeah so uh he overstayed those 90 days and he stayed for like 97 days by mistake obviously you just lost track of time or whatever I don't know how because that's never happened to me nope no friend of mine as well yeah remember that guy oh yeah I remember but yeah dude like okay so you overstay seven days that's that's bad so you expect that you're gonna pay a fine so that before you finish that I just want to let my exact my friend had the exact same situation all we had to do is pay a fine so that's that's what you need to know and why this is weird look at this guy like hooting and stuff is having fun anyway let's carry on so yes you you normally pay a fine not these days though but there were some very shocking revelations in his particular case alright because now like I said I'm never gonna mention who he is but he isn't rented I'm oh yeah you gettin it back at ya little car what you wanna honk at me trucks gone get you that the guy inside is this the car yeah sorry anyway like I said I know the guy so he was kind of living a digital Nomad style life in China a lot of people do doing freelance work in whatever field he does and he got he basically got an offer to do some work for a company in office there and you know it doesn't have a work visa so he shouldn't be doing that but what they decided on was they're like ok listen why don't you come see if you like the work if if it's gonna work out and we'll start the process of getting you on a work visa right right so he was going to the office and doing work every other day type thing anyway after he overstayed his visa he read online what he should do and of course everybody tells you don't try to cross the border so he tried across with your you know invalid visa then there's gonna be a lot of trouble what you need to do is you need to go to your local PSP public security bureau your local police station and show them and apologize pay your fine everything should be okay right slow down please keep speeding up man and then everything should be fine so that's what he did he followed the correct procedures but when he did go they not only did they mugshot and fingerprint him they took a urine test for drugs which is a little you know I think that's a little odd obviously they're looking for reasons to get rid of foreigners these days you know so they did a urine test for drugs but the most shocking part to him was they took him over to a computer and they bought up Google Maps or Baidu Maps and they showed the building that this office that he's been working in they showed that they're like why do you keep going here are you working here he was he was shocked at that knee he just he was calm about it and he left right anyway what happened is his visa got cancelled and I don't know if he's got an entry ban probably not but his visa got cancelled means you have to go he has to go back to his country to apply for a new one yeah but that that's a little situation actually shocked him enough and woke him up to realize that it's not this easygoing free situation that he thought it was before it made him realize that they are actually monitoring him they know where he goes you know and it sounds ridiculous sounds like a conspiracy theory but it's a real thing that always happen you know that that does happen and that's the problem is all these other guys that are singing the praises of our free Chinese how amazing Chinese it's only because they haven't been burned yet they haven't actually seen it with their own eyes and all these stories they hear from people like you or me that a first-hand experience similar situations they're always like are those idiots they just hate China they're just trying to exaggerate try to make China look bad that'll never happen to me I have a Chinese wife I've got my crunch in Miami connections I got my connections you know I know him of this uncle in the police blah blah blah everything's gonna be fine it's only those idiot foreigners like them you know and then it happens to them and they're like oh my god they were right [ __ ] gotta get out of this place you know yep can you add to that I know these guys they pulled over time to pay your bribe and date um no no I just I really think that it's something to be concerned about if you're considering that stay like a long term stay not for the tourist thing but keep in mind China still has a huge security apparatus that is tasked with following foreigners around in their actions especially if you do if you're doing something like what we do but even if you're just doing piecemeal work you're definitely being watched and they're waiting to NAB you especially right now yeah and so watch this kind of foreign population - until for a while I believe if this kind of stuff is gonna keep going on and on and on of course we do have more personal stories of things that have happened to us but this episode has gone on long enough it probably has I do still want to add to it though it's a 26 minutes long that's good people like it they like I'm speaking for people as if I know them but I believe that they're like a little bit of long-form at once in a while okay well then I'll use an example yes please do okay when I I just it's hard to talk about this get a sip because I knew that I can't talk about it when I was in China right and when I got a knock on my door one time from a cop right there's about 11 o'clock and it was after I've already told the drone story right now when I was when I was caught out for flying the drone and getting the exact same footage as everyone else does and when they brought up my file on the computer just like that the person you're talking about you know they knew which building he was going to yeah except my my file head thing is highlighted like often Shops at Wan Jia goes goes here to eat often at this citron restaurant right often buys beer there is in there like I'm some sort of some sort of like espionage victim or something you know name in it was very unsettling to see him before this is I'm in before all the comments down below they say well the NSA that you think they don't have all the information not in you and blah blah blah no I don't know same level that's China yeah sure you know I think China uses it for malicious purposes and you know try it try it tries to control and make people unsettled especially people that do what I do and do it you do but yeah that is it's terrifying and that was another kind of little push you're not even sure you know this kind of thing probably won't happen as much in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai okay where the foreign population is big of course they still have to keep an eye on the front or position and they always do but when you're living in like you were living in Hawaii Joe small 30 City and if he live like this guy was living in Shenzhen but he was living in the outskirts of Shinshu so not downtown right and each little area has their local police districts you know Bureau so they're tasked with keeping an eye on like outsiders and stuff they you know they'll pay a closer eye but yeah it is actually quite quite shocking you know at the end of the day I don't want to be fear-mongering and I'm not making this video with you in order to dissuade people from going to China this is something I always say but I do like people to actually see what's going on and if they're going to go and live in a place they have to understand what's going on there you know without having to demonize it you just have to know that that's what something you have to accept and you can't deny it you can't pretend it's not happening just because you see fancy clothes and money and you you you feel like everything's great around you doesn't mean that that dark underbelly isn't there too you know so as you prepared and you understand that's what's going on you can adapt and you can live with it right yeah every so that's pretty much the bill in the end all of this episode is that money and progress even if it is glorious as Deng Xiaoping said right that's allegedly to get rich is glorious yeah maybe if you'd really care about money that much but whatever it might look cool and interesting and nice but remember that doesn't stop places like China from being a totalitarian communist controlling place Yeah right and if you run afoul of the law your image will be very very very quickly shattered yeah irreparably you know right so is there anything you'd like to tell our subscribers before we start yeah I mean the be-all and the end-all is that the more money that China does get actually it's just more money to fund you know they're the one party control and like how much they can actually do to control right so that's that's why it's scary to see like the old system that was actually more comfortable where you greased palms on a very low level yeah to make problems go away and now it's become like national security issue for the ramping up of like nationalism it's it is veer mongering in a way because you know it's scary sure but yeah the reality is situation is that most people are gonna be fine especially as a tourist or something like that how are you but be aware there's a bigger agenda that NAB's people innocent people for seemingly innocuous things just it you know promote what they what they want the world to think right now so absolutely be aware of that and what do you guys think down below do you think do you think your own country is spying on you and yeah is in the water get brain force yeah exactly whether or not you believe in that or not I hope you appreciate the video give it a thumbs up if you did it was a very long one but if you like to see this kind of stuff make sure you hit that subscribe button and I'll warn you most of our videos are not this long so you know if you thought this one is a little too lengthy then don't worry most of them are around 10 or 15 minutes yep and anyway I'd also like to say that if you think progress is worth this absolute terrible pollution that we're riding through I think you need to recheck your priorities because I don't think it's worth living in this dystopian sort of polluted horrible environment just for the sake of being able to I don't know have Kings tea you know don't pray right anyway you know whether or not you believe in tight government control or nots we love you all the same so until next time you know the drill as always a stay awesome don't forget every single Monday another ATV China video right here same time same place on Wednesday you can check out lower 86 1 p.m. est and Friday just in time for a beer go and check me out on my channel serpens a day

Channel: ADVChina

Views: 221,667

Rating: 4.8676548 out of 5

Keywords: china, chinese, ccp, communist party of China, communism in china, prc, peoples republic of china, laowhy86, serpentza, advchina, adv china, living in china, china economy, economics, c-milk, winston sterzel, advpodcasts, chinese culture, china society, chinese society, china development, belt and road, vietnam, haiphong, hanoi, northern vietnam, motorcycles, motovlog, talk show, politics, china growth, asia, usa china, trade war, chinese language, china vietnam, china vlog, bri

Id: veJVcRVWPAI

Length: 29min 8sec (1748 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 11 2019