Why I left China for Good!

I love China so why did I leave it was a sad day when I realized that in order to continue to be myself I would have to leave China contrary to silly rumors floating around the Chinese nationalists fears I was not expelled or chased out of China I saw the writing on the wall and I left I could no longer consciously accept what was happening around me and I had reached a point where nothing but stagnation and self-censorship were the only paths forward let's rewind a bit I want to talk about what drew me to China in the first place and why it is that I fell in love with the country despite all the negatives the CCP brings to the table growing up in South Africa and especially the time I grew up in South Africa and all this drastic change things let's just put it this way weren't good for someone who looks like me so being a young white South African professional meant that the opportunities really just weren't there being an IT professional and running my own business had a client and this client I used to go to his place and fix his computers and his networks and his service and he specialized in closed-circuit televisions so you know security cameras and alarm systems and that kind of thing and he was going to be getting a whole bunch of cameras from China from Shenzhen but he wasn't sure if they would work back home you know with his systems and his clients so he offered to pay for my plane ticket to fly to China with him to go look at the factories just so that I could be there as a technical adviser and make sure that everything was going to work so he wouldn't be wasting his money so we flew in to Shenzhen and this was my first time to go to Asia because you know I've been to the UK several times of my youth that I family there etc but I had never been to Asia I had always had a fascination with Japan Japanese culture and that sort of thing but yeah I didn't even know much about China to be honest I was just blown away the the vibe the vibrancy of the city the crowds because you know bear in mind South Africa is not a very crowded place you can go to certain places where they're people but nothing like what you see in China so I was just blown away by the vibrancy and the three days that I spent in Shenzhen on that business trip made my mind up I had had more fun in three days than I had in a year back home just to be able to walk around at night seeing people having barbecue beer on the streets you know just I knew I could feel this this youthful vibe of the city and I knew this is where I wanted to go and this is where I wanted to live so I flew back home I sold everything and you know took all my savings paid off all my debt and booked a plane ticket back and I flew there and try to make my way and it's been a hell of a ride I went from arriving there not knowing what to do living in hotels expensive hotels was a bad mistake because I didn't really know what the deal was and just trying to explore and figure things out I had a girlfriend you know I met a girl there and things were crazy for the first couple of months but I ran out of my savings and actually ended up losing everything and ending up on the street so I actually ended up homeless for about three days and it was quite a harrowing three days it was during this sort of flood season and the rains were coming down and actually spent a night in McDonald's with my suitcase one time because they 24 hours there and I got a couple of stories so when I was on the street my Chinese friend put me in contact with an agent and this agent would take foreigners and give them jobs and I ended up sleeping on the agents couch and for about a month until me and another guy who was there too another fellow South African we put our we pooled our resources put all our money together and we rented an apartment and that's how I started to get back on my feet and it's actually very easy in China to get back on your feet type thing and start fresh so from there it just snowballed I always had a goal in mind I always wanted to improve I got better jobs I bought a car I went through a failed marriage and I finally found my wife who I'm absolutely in love with in a door so I more or less reached all of my goals I was happily married I was living in a nicer part of town I had a car and I had a good stable job and finally I moved on to YouTube which was in fact even more of what I wanted because I could be my own boss and just make my videos and go out and film and edit and and so on this brings us to the end of my Chinese love affair I had reached a peak China could no longer offer me any more goals and there was nothing to strive for China simply could not offer me the following number one a safe place to have a family now of course people will try and tell me that China is safe and I know that it can be safe but it's not stable if you're a foreigner relying on a changeable government that keeps moving the goal posts when it comes to visas and who gives absolutely no rights to foreigners Chinese citizens will always be favored in any sort of legal dispute on top of that it's not safe for children as much as the CCP tries to stamp out and censor all the scandals fake or expired vaccines poison baby formula mass stabbings in kindergartens the unfathomably large kidnapping and child trafficking industry not to mention the general lack of environmental health issues you know you can't drink the tap water the air quality is appalling health care facilities are substandard trust me I used to train doctors and let's not forget the education system which demands praise of the Communist Party above all else suffice it to say this is not a good place to bring up a child unless you have no choice secondly on a more selfish note I could not pursue any of my hobbies as China does not accommodate them most people are too focused on making money to have any sort of real hobby and those with money splash it on lavish designer brands supercars and sort of fleeting entertainment you know karaoke spending a lot of money and showing off to their friends in a fleshie restaurant or something so I could not wrench on old cars and do the things that I enjoy doing to relax but you know all that aside there is a far more insidious reason for me to leave and that is because I value my freedom you see freedom can be taken away from you in an instant in China and for very very arbitrary reasons the rule of law in China is pretty much a joke and is selectively enforced and usually out of convenience the police will not stop or hassle you unless of course it's easy or in their interest China has been slowly falling apart the economy which saw an incredible and meteoric rise has begun to plummet drastically of course the CCP with it's nothing to see here methodology has managed to convince the world and especially the Chinese population through sleight of hand and cunning tricks that everything is just fine and when it's not well it's not their fault it's the outside world keeping China down they aggressively silenced dissidents or anyone who exposes the truth as to what is happening in China they prevent Chinese society from coming apart at the seams by stitching up and squashing anything that reveals the truth so anything but positive coverage of China and Chinese society will not be tolerated aka me who makes videos about things that don't please me in my life and things that do please me in my life the fact that I to even cover some of the things that are just wrong with Chinese society blatantly wrong puts me on that hit list you know you are allowed to have a little gripe here or there but you may not criticize the government or anything that is a result of what the government has done power and control is what the CCP cares about above all else and they maintain this through social harmony which is another term for stagnation and mediocrity go about your day you stupid sheep eat breed study work listen to the government and don't you dare make waves you step out of line and you give anyone else the idea that there's more to life than GWAR odds then you'll be dealt with remember that to be rich is glorious so put your head down be a monotonous robots and your only ambitions can be to make more money and to make China richer that's it things started to get very serious when the police visited me more and more often I remember one time I arrived at my apartment and waiting for me outside was a local plainclothes police person just checking up on me and that's because I had been out of town for a couple of days this is a little concerning this means that the building management must have radioed or called the local little police station when they saw me coming in to the compound because I first went to the shop to go buy a bunch of stuff and so by the time I made it up to my apartment the policeman was already there waiting to check my passport you know it's quite annoying when every single time I visited Hong Kong because you know you can I was very close you just pop over the border but every single time I came back from Hong Kong my wife would get a message on WeChat from the local police station asking why I have not yet gone down to the police station to get my new entry stamp scanned into the system it even got to the point where the local police were annoyed by this - and so we kind of made a deal that I wouldn't have to go in every time I would just simply have to take a photo of the new entry stamp in my passport and send it to them because they were getting annoyed with us directive to check on me all the time as well so of course it was very annoying and kind of creepy that they were keeping such a close eye on me but it was when China started to disappear people and it was when my friend Michael was arrested and taken away as part of China's blatantly obvious tit for tat hostage game regarding the Huawei CFO arrest in Canada that I decided it was time to go I had been working on getting a visa to the United States for over a year I see milk had already moved back after narrowly escaping being detained his story is over on his channel leave a link in the description and we have mutually decided that in order for us to continue our adv China adventures around the world and other bigger projects like our television documentaries that we would have to base ourselves somewhere stable and China was not that place at least in the USA you have a fair chance in the legal system unlike China where there's a ninety nine percent conviction rate and being a foreigner immediately puts you on the losing team and so it was that I left China with sadness in my heart once again leaving behind familiar faces familiar places and a way of life that I had cultivated over fourteen and a half years but with hope and happiness knowing that I was doing the right thing and could now not only talk about the things I had seen and filmed but had to self-censor in order to avoid being arrested / detained / deported but also pursue the things I dearly wanted to do have a family work on cars and finally find a place where I belong stay awesome

Channel: serpentza

Views: 1,765,791

Rating: 4.7686219 out of 5

Keywords: Leaving China, left China, Winston Sterzel left China, Winston Sterzel leaving China, why I left China, ran away from China, escaping China, leave China, china, foreigner living in china, adv china, china leaving, china vlog 2019, moving to china, expat in china, expats in china, move to china, kicked out of china, advchina, teaching in china, life in china vlog, laowhy86, cmilk, c-milk, advpodcasts, china how it is, winston sterzel, teach in china, adv podcasts, work in china

Id: nWgqdfAomVI

Length: 12min 0sec (720 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 03 2020

Reddit Comments

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[u/komnenos]

This was nice the first time but haven't Winston and CMilk literally made this SAME video more or less for around two years now? I feel like I've seen them post videos with the same title for some time now.

[u/Xis_a_dong]

I wonder when they are going to get tired of just repeating themselves over and over. Equine flogging at its most hilarious. Broken record on steroids.

[u/runningwithsharpie]

Yeah, they had some occasionally good stuff. But once they left China, the materials just get pretty typical bitter and ragging on China (often justifiable). However, when you are not in the country and without deep knowledge of China's economics and geopolitics, you will eventually devolve into "bitter laowai shitting on China" drivel.

[u/goodguyromney]

these guys have the biggest martyrdom complex I've seen on the internet. you would've thought these guys were right there with Liu Xiaobo the way they talk.

I used to think it was just for clicks but I think they really drank their own kool-aid on this one.