I watched plenty of the videos they posted. I used to like most of Serpentza videos and found their videos to be very informative of what life was like in Shenzhen compared to Shanghai, but the more and more I watched their videos the more and more I feel they are just click-baits abusing traditional prejudices of western people to get more people to watch their videos.

I also started to realize that despite them living in China for a reasonable amount of time they didn’t actually create a Chinese life. I don’t give a shit about their excuses about it or their reasons for it, but the fact is currently there are tons of educated Chinese people with good English level. I have been invited by neighbors to join football and cycling teams. I got my community to finalize the elevator decoration and I participated in discussions with my neighbors about how to handle the internal residence car-traffic.

Did I meet some assholes here and there saying some stupid words like “this is not how it works in China, maybe you should go back to your country”? Yes, I did. But let’s be honest with each other, almost EVERY SINGLE IMMIGRANT to the USA or Europe suffers at least once in life someone making fun of him for not being American and telling him to go back home. Even when they personally don’t, they need to suffer politicians and people in TV talking about kicking out immigrants from our country, kick them out! they are stealing our jobs! So I have totally no sympathy for them every time they talk about China being “so hard to integrate”.

They mix things trying to get people to think and follow their way of thinking and sympathize with them, but they just don’t get it most of the time. Laowhy86, for example, talks about Amazon China suddenly asking Chinese ID Card to kick out foreigners from online shopping. I have news for him, the Chinese government requires identification for online shopping because they lately started to define and charge taxes for foreign-imported products sold through e-commerce. Previously foreign products were sold trough taobao in a black-market style way rather than properly imported. Yet in their video, they totally forget to talk about the latest moves from the Chinese government to issue ID Cards for foreigners working in China to make their life in china more convenient and be able to use the same services that Chinese people use.

So, as of lately, I feel those guys suffer from the typical issue of so many westerns in China: They come here looking for an experience or money, but they are not really interested to make friends with locals and learn to respect and integrate with them. Some don’t even bother to learn a minimum amount of Chinese for daily life (like how to count from 1 to 10) and only hang-out with other expats in whichever city they live. They create their own bubbles where they typically talk about how much better is this or that back home and how bad is this or that here. Because physical and social differentiation, they slowly but surely end having the opinion that they are made of a better quality material than local people and that pushes farther away from their desire to integrate. Females will be looked down if they choose to date any Chinese guys and males are expected to only bring into the group Chinese girls that is extremely westernized and western-lover.

They tend to believe that Chinese living in dirty/ugly apartments live like that because they like it! Not because they are saving money to get married and want to avoid all expenses at all cost, they don’t even bother thinking that hey, maybe those guys don’t have the required money to rent a better place. They don’t realize that while China has been modernizing very fast, there is still a big chunk of the population that is under or un-educated and another big chunk of the population that is still carrying over bad habits from their parents. They fail to realize that China is a country in transition, you have plenty of people you can befriend to, but you need to pick up your friends, just as you would do in any other country. And they fail to realize that a huge amount of Chinese themselves are complaining and fighting to make people with bad habits behave. They fail to realize that Chinese hate being identified and characterized by those people. And they fail to do all that, because in their bubble, if a Chinese is clean, likes to live in a good area, likes to eat healthy food, that is a westernized Chinese, he is not a real Chinese. Those guys are no different from those immigrants going to western countries and living within their self-created ghettoes and complaining the host country people of not allowing them to be part of the society.

Edit: Fixed a couple of typos