Our Terrifying Chinese Mafia Experience

hey there guys welcome to another episode of adv china today we're going to be taking you somewhere very special [Music] but i thought just as a bit of a trivia here you know on my way into the office today i was riding in here and uh at the traffic light a guy in a harley like stopped over and shouted over to me like hey what's that on your helmet so it is a bit weird if you don't read chinese as you can see um on my helmet i've got a lot of chinese characters these are all the provinces in china that i've been to and on this side it's all the countries that i've been to with a bike yeah yeah i mean that have ridden around on a motorcycle obviously you know i don't put every country so you know the countries have got taiwan uh south africa thailand and england um and that's actually just taipei city that was where's america oh yeah well i mean i put the helmet together before i'd ever been to america so but now we're actually over here province is where we are today actually means black dragon river yeah and it's the northernmost province of china so you're gonna see very stark differences from what you might have seen from our other videos um i would say you'd probably compare it to maybe northeastern america to be honest it's very green very harsh winters um and it even the vibe of all the architecture is not chinese at all no it's actually it's super cool very russian during our whole conquering northern china trip we went up through these provinces this is probably my favorite sort of um stop off to be honest the harbin city yeah yeah harvey needs to be a russian city and you're going to see it looks like russia it's actually a very impressive looking city not just because it's russian it's quite clean yeah it's nice well at least the the city center i should say the outskirts are a little different yeah look here here's the thing i want you to notice in the background we're currently riding into harbin and there's something that i would like everybody to keep an eye out for and that is other motorcycles yeah you'll notice that we are the only motorcycles on the road and there's a reason for this they're banned motorcycles in harbin which is of course something we weren't really sure of right and you know this is one of the biggest pitfalls of riding a motorcycle through china is you don't actually always know where motorcycles are allowed and where they are today ban them for various reasons the biggest reason is they want to get rid of a poorer look because motorcycles are for poor people in china right you know we're not talking about harley's and stuff there are harley clubs and things you can find them in beijing in shanghai but not in harbin you're not allowed to ride so you'll be riding on your trip and you'll come across a place and you'll notice there are no bikes around and then you kind of like whoops and we noticed that we're like hang on a second obviously it's a bike band area we better get to our hotel all right what do we got there i saw some propaganda behind the rainbow okay let me uh the irony what's what's at the end of the rainbow xi jinping propaganda yeah uh let me can you get a little closer thank you this is jinding dying john that's not a super exciting one but it's exciting very telling actually if i can explain are you gonna you translate it first look you get that kind of thing in in a lot of cities and wherever when you go to the downtown park so i want to explain later why there's a focus here okay but that i guess it means uh without fail focus on yeah ending is like without fail yeah un unswerving how would you say it like with like keep just doing it hold the line just do it don't give up yeah it says uh focus on building the economy and winning and winning a battle to completely revitalize revamp and build harbin yeah so sorry guys incredibly boring kind of no but there's this is important so the whole region of dongbae where we are right now and the reason that gombe is always in the news in china is because it's the only place in china with a negative population growth that doesn't happen it's negative it's not just like low numbers the reason is people all leave it because of the iron rice bowl system that china had set up the state jobs this was all manufacturing for steel production and all this kind of rust belt type stuff that china it's dried up in china yeah so all these people leave here and it's very concerning in these areas because they're running out of money right so a lot of the young people are in fact leaving so this propaganda again is telling people what they have to do because there's an issue at hand i got you right i just thought we'd point out the license plates we always do that you can see it says hey a hey but hey hey long john yeah exactly uh hey means black yeah and a is just means it's the capital the province name is probably the coolest in all of china black dragon river there isn't a better one there is not a better one one of the coolest provinces as well and uh a always means the capital so hard being the capital very beautiful city was a past russian city as you'll see um and it's very impressive it's a very impressive city in china well when you've been riding through well we've been riding through a lot of uh the dongbae area and mercedes dealership oh yeah there's a ben there's actually look at that dude is the bentley dealership bentley next to the mercedes did i skip back or forward i saw it on the way in right this badly there's mercedes when you ride through some of the donbay cities like i've always said they look pretty much the same it doesn't matter if you're in the south of china the north of china things look very similar but this looks different yeah and so up until this point of course during the trip i was being very sort of pessimistic and annoyed by this all the time it's like come on can we just all right why don't we like what are we doing but now we get here and i'm like finally something fresh something different and that's like you said because it was built by the russians yes yeah um so anyway long story short they kept the the same architectural style so when the money came and they still kept building russian-style buildings yeah that's why it looks quite it looks like a russian city i mean you see a lot of banks i'm seeing banks here there's rainbows there's this station yeah the rainbow's actually very nice the city center is absolutely gorgeous especially with saint sophia cathedral the saint sophia cathedral is very cool yeah so anyway but dongbae has got such a different culture i wanted to point something out dongbae is so different than the south of china especially up here you know when you think of china you think of like beijing opera and like that high-pitched shrill opera sound and like dragons and you think of like um i don't know like wontons and just all the imagery like those those red pagoda type things that's not up here what you get up here is very tall very bigger people yeah that speak very loudly drink a lot and act much more like a russian wood than a normal chinese person would i mean it shocked me when i first went to heartbeat and i saw construction workers really big burly guys you know without their shirts on eating eating lunch they were drinking beer yeah and they were eating sausage dipping it in mustard and eating cabbage and i was like what they're chinese guys right yeah very different than the rest of china even in china even chinese people they have the stereotypes of dengue people as being strong tall they can drink a lot yeah and dumb that's a stereotype they're not actually done of course after we arrived we went straight away to get some local food so these are cool these restaurants it's so cold in harbin it's freezing you're talking six good six months of absolute atrociously cold weather so they have these underground uh restaurants they're so cheap you get these uh these wheat pancakes yeah and they're very flat and you put these savory fillings inside and it's almost like a burrito yeah or you could say a russian bellini yeah very similar again huge influence from russia here yeah with the chinese flavor but this i would say our best eating in the whole trip was obviously up in this area you get sausages it's the main garlic over there yes very very russian influence i had no introduction to russian food before this why why would we drinking snow beer when they've got harvey and pizza which is way better i don't know i think this particular restaurant only had snow that's right and we're very disappointed yeah because harbin beer is much much better anyway long story short these these very communist era kind of taunting as they call them cafeterias still offer very cheap food yeah and so this is just an area that you'd you'd hang out in um city center and all that kind of stuff yeah i just wanted to show like the architecture you can definitely tell uh they're selling the usual tap that you see everywhere in china but shoelaces yeah and uh and phone accessories and stuff uh you know usual tourist tat but you can see the architecture here yeah like like you said it's very different it's not like you see anywhere else in china now something happened to us not here yeah like quite a ways off um now if you've watched our documentary conquering northern china if you haven't there are links below definitely suggest checking it out we went for what's called a blind massage we went into these blind masseuses and the idea is that people that are blind of course their other senses develop you know better that's the whole idea behind the blinds it's a bit of a rumor yeah well either way and the whole idea is that they're they're touch sense of touch is better so they know how to find like the knots and all the things that are wrong with you and they can give you a really good massage and so you get this system where blind people are actually hired to become masseuses which is kind of cool yeah project and it gives them a job to do and stuff and so it is a positive of the chinese people oh yeah they give jobs to blind people absolutely so anyway we went to the blind masseuse and they almost killed us of course wow seriously i mean they're good at their job but yeah wow was it painful but that's that's a typical chinese massage but whenever you ask like a chinese person about a blind massage you go in there to get hurt yeah exactly but just before we got into the blind massage place we were busy setting up we had our cameras and stuff with us okay everything's there and we're just there are four foreigners and a chinese guy our our chinese driver who's hanging around with us he carried the equipment yeah so yeah we're standing there as four foreigners and we're getting ready to kind of go do the introduction yeah in this alleyway and this like group of burly you know gangster looking guys we'll put a screw uh a shot up what they look like these dongbay guys they wear these beaded necklaces or gold chains and they won't wear shirts a lot of times and they'll have tattoos all over dragons and koi so now here's the thing the the two cameramen were british okay i'm south african but whenever somebody asks where i'm from in china i say i'm british just so i can avoid this hour-long conversation explaining why i'm not black you know and you know the whole history of south africa and all that stuff so they ask where i'm from just say washi ingo and i'm british and then they'll get like aha gentlemen or something like that it's kind of the usual thing you hear and i was about to say where i was yeah but it's very very very lucky that they asked me and the camera guys first where are you from and i was out washing and you know keep in mind they were there their presence was very threatening yeah so we're like what's going on here are they coming to shake us down or something and immediately you were about to say where you're from but luckily they replied immediately and they're like good if you said you were american there'd be a problem yes and the the language they used in the town they used was very threatened they leaned into us and they made sure to make sure that we were not american what what was it was it because of the south china sea stuff there was something going on at the time do you think it was the thaad missiles was that what it was actually the head missiles way before that but there was a huge hangover after that of anti-americanism and actually the anti-americanism started in 2014 from what i remember and all the way up until like 2018 2019 um that's it kept going well i mean it goes in waves yeah but i found like there i had other american friends and they'd be fine everything's yeah the thing is like i'm talking about people that are looking for trouble sure but there would be like totally waves all the time so it'll be fine to be american for a while just okay canadians are bad yeah all of a sudden french people are bad right or american people or canadians or so at the time american people were bad [Music] that's me jack i'm a pretty radical dude i've been trying to teach my whole family all about internet security they're pretty dumb when it comes to these things you know there are a lot of dangers out there on the world wide web but i even told my old man that if you're gonna catch the wave of the internet super highway you gotta do it safely with nordvpn take some advice from my main man jack the internet's a scary place it really isn't the way it used to be back in the past there are a lot of threats out there so we use nordvpn for multiple reasons i mean it's a very good way to keep your data safe from prying eyes on top of that it's a fantastic way to circumvent region locking when it comes to perhaps wanting to watch a certain kind of show that you normally can't in your country also if you happen to be in a situation where you're stuck behind a firewall maybe in an oppressive country or regime not vpn's a way around that so we recommend nordvpn don't forget to go to nordvpn.com forward slash adv china you'll get a massive discount off of a two-year plan and if you use the code adv china you'll get an additional month for free now back to the show so anyway this what i wanted to introduce is that in harbin um it's in dongbae yeah so i remember i talked about that rust belt the jobs dry up right so you have this culture and chinese people will tell you about this before anyone yeah the dongbae people they have uh this problem where there's no no more state jobs in some of these sectors so you have young men that are too they're not they don't have entrepreneurial spirits they don't leave yeah and they stick around they get indoctrinated in these kind of gangs it's not like crips and bloods or yakuza or something like you're thinking about it's late it's a bunch of lazy people that have nothing to do so they go cause trouble they walk around with pipes they beat each other up all the time they get drunk and throw bottles at each other sure and they go around to these village areas or alleyways and they ask for protection money it's a very old school racket yeah it's hey it's hey is that called the black society mafia mafia yeah it's just such a low it's difficult to explain it's not the kind of mafia that's going to trail your family for generations well you're not you're not expecting like an italian don no not in a suit no but that's what that word implies right yeah yeah so you get these guys they're usually tattooed you've got some great footage of some in beijing yeah we'll throw that up here i tell you what i took that footage of my own peril you have no idea oh these guys are scary and they noticed right at the end and i was just like oh i'm just looking at my camera i'm just pretending you know because like you'll see and if you'll see in the footage we'll show it the one guy like looks at me and that's when i'm like oh my camera is just like you know i'm doing some settings or something because man oh man these guys are strong too i put myself in apparel to get that footage for you i'll tell you what and the difference between us and them is they they fight all the time yeah that's like their topic right don't ever let anyone tell you that like oh chinese people men are weak or something they can't but these guys guys brutal dude anyway long story short they the economy dries up and they have no opportunity so they go around and shake down these areas but they also protect them so that what they were doing was protecting the blind masseuse area that they have control over right they obviously get a cut from this this business yeah they wanted to make sure that we weren't there to stir any that we weren't journalists and definitely not americans right sure but dongbae in general i mean there's a stereotype i actually have this really good quote okay that i translated and something that i believe to be very true a chinese person told me the other day we're having this conversation and he said there's a saying in eastern and in southern china we get rich because we drink tea and the more caffeine we drink the sharper our minds get this makes good business agreements materialize would you agree with that yeah in southern china and eastern china you know that rich areas like india jung and jiangsu people are rich there because they don't they're not massive alcoholics they're not super binge drinking all the time well it happens the alcohol culture is very different i got it i got i i get it yes maybe with normal people but every single business deal that i was a part of every single government meeting i was a part of everyone is gumbaying by joining getting drunk now every single time without fail now i will agree with you on the government aspect what i will say is people that have long-term cooperations with each other they are having tea in southern china they're going and smoking cigarettes and having tea whereas in in dongbae they have a european drinking culture and that they're getting drunk all the time right you know how you're you're talking about oh they're gone bang and doing all these things they're not they don't like it no they don't like it no that's why like the bosses will designate people to drink for them very often whereas up here in dongbae they like it it's part of their culture drinking is is absolutely a part of everything right yeah yeah so the the second part of the quote is donbay people so northern chinese people are poor because they drink alcohol and when a deal is about to go through people are too drunk to remember what they talked about and the alcohol has already made them feel like they've accomplished everything right there is something to that right you know there's a it's a very different culture up their way in the north that's right um so anyway this is not the first time that we ran into the dongbae mafia types yeah it happened again and they oftentimes are agents of the government which is something people probably don't understand because you would never get that in like the well very often when the government is trying to do something which of course they can't just do like evict people of their land so they can steal the land for development and selling it to real estate people if you've got people that don't want to move they hire these thugs to go and beat them up and to destroy their houses and stuff they actually do that if they want business to move out of town they hire them to do it yeah i mean you saw what happened with the hong kong protesters they hired thugs to go and cause trouble and stuff beating people up and things it's it's part of chinese society it is yeah there's actually places that export these thugs you know they'll raise like in these towns in dongbae they'll they'll raise these people remember there was an app that came out where you could for a short while you could pay dongbay thugs to go beat people up for you yeah it's a real thing there's an export economy for these big burly guys that have nothing going on in their lives they don't care if they get in trouble with the cops right and they'll go and try to make a little extra money yeah this is interesting this is a bit of a hip-hop culture that was taking off at the time still is we both filmed quite a lot of that it seems yeah it was just fun to see it's it's good to see the youth expressing themselves for sure yeah and they're good they're talented yeah absolutely and that's why we spend so much time filming these guys because it's a rare sight honest with you in china can't to conform is the way to go and so to see that kind of thing is we just saw a lot of things in heartbean that kind of impressed us to to stand out from the crowd a little bit right here we've left the town now and this is where we came came across our second uh thug this is only 20 kilometers interaction yeah but i just wanted to point out how nice it looks out here beautiful is it very does that remind you of like evergreen forest or something yeah it's got pine trees it's kind of alpine in you know in some parts you know all the different flowers and stuff very uncharacteristic a lot of insects yeah huge amounts of insects lots of those uh deer flies still no birds though i'm not seeing any birds here look okay watch our videos watch every single clip freeze frame every single thing when we're in and around the city's zero you know where i saw birds was in st sophia cathedral in the city center there are pigeons yeah those trained pigeons that's why they fly around yeah anyway um here we are riding uh yeah we've just finished filming something to do with birds actually yeah i i gotta tell that story okay you're right you know that they're these famous herons um i know this but you have to explain to them in chichi it's a very funny they've got like a red dot it's actually a japanese uh you know the original bird as well very beautiful and there's this place where they go to nest every year okay and it's this natural thing and people go to uh watch them right and it's kind of an interesting situation because you go it's a touristy thing you pay to get in you go to this place there's like a viewing area that you go stand at and then every once in a while um somebody will like shout something and then you'll see these birds come over the hill they'll fly they'll come land they'll like wait around for a little bit for all the tourists to take photos and then they all fly off behind the hill so we flew the drone up okay because we're getting drone footage and they have cages on the other side and they're keeping them in cages so it's not a natural you know let's come on over these are trained birds that are kept in cages and released for the tourists and they're trying to come straight back to the cage area where they put back in their cages when it comes to nature winston and i have rarely found an authentic experience like we've we've met authentic people we've had authentic experiences in china but if it comes to animals in particular it is pretty much always staged so anyway i just wanted to put that yeah that was a nature preserve yeah like a national treasure yeah i mean so anyway whatever it's just it's built as this place where they come naturally they they migrate there every year but know what they're actually kept there under lock and key and train right anyway it doesn't matter so these local thugs in these areas they're they're trained to go look for you know these this would be an example of ones that are hired by the government they're trained to go look for things out of the ordinary and go to go harass people yeah well what do we see in the distance here this is one of the funnier aspects of china is when you travel around the world areas is the fake police yeah to make people slow down yeah so um i we were making a joke and we were like we need directions why don't you why don't you go ask that that policeman over there right okay and so you're like sure i'll i'll head on over and ask him so you can see um they put these guys up sometimes they put cardboard cutouts as well yes just depends i'm sure i've seen fake cop car ones yeah yeah sometimes they'll have a broken down cop car i've seen in her mongolia or just a cardboard cutter or a cardboard cutout yeah so yeah anyway you're just like playing around you know messing around giving a little tap and like hey you know can you tell us where to go and oh he doesn't know you know that kind of thing there is and this is what got the attention of something a bit more sinister yeah so we actually have the clip of this but it'll be a part of the behind the scenes for our tv show i i didn't see this happen because i've literally after vaulted dude well no i left me there's a petrol station up and then in the distance petrol so that was our next stop so it's like okay i'll see you at the petrol station so you know i saw there was a petrol station in the distance so i'm like all right i'll see you guys at the petrol station because you know our cameraman and stuff were there they're still fun yeah they were filming you and i hopped on on my bike and i went to the petrol station and you guys took forever and i was like what's going on with these guys something dad yeah explain so black car rolls up and it's got it was totally full and i got flashbacks of one of the worst experiences i've had in china so there's six guys packed in like sardines into this car front guys have shirts on guys in the back you have shirts i'm like here we go so they pull up next to me and i i lean over to talk to them they're like wait wait then they see i'm a foreigner and then they see our cameramen are foreigners too right and they're that set them off a little bit i they're definitely like mad at what i was doing because you're messing with i was messing with the fake police the fake policemen right i wasn't hurting it or anything no but they were like that was enough to trigger what you could see as if a local was doing that they would go harass that person right they saw as a foreigner and they still harassed me but not to the same extent that they might do to some poor kid that was like messing around there anyway they were like what are you doing here sure and then they're like whoa the other guy who goes why are there cameras here what are you doing why are you filming here and then after a while like i told the guys the camera guys i was like i'll just put the cameras away we don't need to film this anymore and they didn't i don't know if they caught on immediately i gotta say there were quite a few situations where they weren't very i don't know a tentative or attuned to the situation at hand where we're like yeah we gotta go but yeah anyway long story short they did eventually like pack up the camera stuff and the guys were the guys just kept shouting at me like what are you doing why are you here and i was like we're just traveling we're just traveling they kept asking why do you have these big cameras why do you have these cameras what are you doing why are you filming this why are you filming this and i said i always just thought it was funny because the police officer is fake and i chuckled yeah they did not think that was funny at all i'm sure dead completely dead ass cirrus one of them lights a cigarette i was like gosh it reminded me of a scenario that i've covered on my channel previously of six guys in a car harassing me sure so thankfully that that transpired into not being a terrible situation but they were not pleased and they they told us to leave the town they said get out of here sure so we got out of there and they didn't they they followed us they followed us and then as soon as they got to the petrol station they took off yeah they didn't get out i did see i was trying to tell i when i reconnected with you i was trying to tell you like like let's go let's get petrol later but they left yeah yeah you did you did see the car i did see the car go past like after you guys i thought they were gonna pull in with us yeah so that's where you guys were all that times dealing with those yeah it's kind of an unpleasant situation so yeah i know that sounds like a minor situation i've dealt with a lot more of that especially when i lived up in these regions um in the past but it's funny to see how pervasive the the whole mafia situation is because again it's just bored ass like not teenagers four teenagers that grow up at the board 20 30 something year olds have nothing in their life yeah and they they eventually make this natural hierarchy the fatter you get the stronger you are you'll see them burning cigarette burns in their arms they start getting tattoos across their chest and they start buying horrible jewelry sure and eventually it just becomes a lifestyle of just getting drunk fighting and harassing people yeah it's a very interesting thing because it's not something you necessarily see down south yeah i mean you see it because it's yeah yeah that's kind of interesting yeah so i guess that was uh our little experience and harbin with the uh mafia yeah and fake plastic birds in the fake birds man seriously there's fake birds that i'm trying to think if we've ever had an organic experience with birds in china i mean look there are birds of course you have to go real far yeah and you know out of the reach of human civilization before you start to see birds in the wild like wild birds exactly definitely not around the cities that's for sure yeah i mean maybe the odd one here or there yeah like a sparrow maybe it's rare maybe one sparrow yeah exactly don't they travel on flocks yeah they do they're supposed to anyway it doesn't matter uh guys thank you once again for watching adv china we hope you learned something new you got to see a new part of china that you haven't seen in our videos before and we can't wait until next time where we bring you something better and more well maybe not better but at least cool i think it'll be better it can be better sometimes uh leave a comment down below if you want to see the south of china again or the more north because we have a bunch of provinces we can oh yeah we got tons of cool things so uh until next time you know the drill as always stay awesome

Channel: ADVChina

Views: 486,367

Keywords: china, mafia, dongbei, northern china, heilongjiang, harbin, chinese mafia, thugs, china vlog, living in china, northeast china, northern china vs southern china, conquering southern china, conquering northern china, china news, harbin china, adv china, winter in china, communist party of china, expats in china, living in china vlog, advchina, china vlogger, cmilk, serpentza, adv podcasts, southern china, advpodcasts, laowhy86, prc, ccp, motovlog, chinese government, propaganda

Id: fShUSNUhLH0

Length: 26min 36sec (1596 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/meridian_smith]

These gangsta guys all try to look that pot bellied version of Buddha.

[u/30lu]

i feel like terrifying was really underplayed in you recounting. of course i wasnt there, but basically 6 guys, half whom were shirtless , in a clown car intimidated you is all i got from the story. i will say this, I found it ironically hilarious that even nature falls victim to chinas propensity of intellectual property theft.

[u/jiang_zemin]

ill stop being mad now, also your example plate should've been 黑A not 蒙A

[u/davy-eastvan]

Harbin gangster thugs are a thing in Vancouver.

[u/Rsupremacy]

Chinese thinking they are tough is the funniest thing ever.