Matthew Tye is originally from Binghamton, New York and he lived in China for ten years, first as an English teacher and later as a successful YouTuber, making fun videos about his life in China, along with his fellow YouTuber, Winston Sterzel.
For years, Matt and Winston posted their amusing slices of life, offering a full immersion into China, sharing their love of that country and offering advice to Westerners interested in living there. They also began producing their own design of hand-built motorcycles, which they used in their road trip documentaries filmed in the Chinese outback.
Over the past three years, it’s been interesting to observe the shift in China through the very personal lens of their videos, as tensions eventually escalated to such a degree that they both relocated to Southern California about a year ago with their Chinese wives and Matthew’s two infant daughters.
This video starts being about a new genre of CCP propaganda films being made about third-tier Chinese cities, that rhapsodize about how their local attractions have made these cities (that nobody outside of China has ever heard of) are now “famous” in the United States. Yes, that United States, the irrelevant dying country that nobody cares about anymore.
Matt says, “Things like this just show you how fragile and how simple a lot of the propaganda campaigns actually are, because if you have to convince your people all the time that the country that they’re supposed to hate is still relevant or it’s still really important for that country to acknowledge China, then that’s really kinda sad.”
Matt’s also notes the burgeoning development of “Wolf Warrior Diplomacy”, exemplified by the video that went viral of a speech made by Chinese sociologist, Dr Yi Li, in which he brags about how China is “driving America to its death”.
Matt tells of how his in-laws back in China, concerned by what they see in the local media, constantly send him articles that gloat about how America is dying, how the GDP is down 10%, how everybody is unemployed, how ‘the election has turned everything upside down and how everybody is now killing each other’.
“There isn’t going to be a civil war, there already is a civil war…everything is being portrayed as America is falling apart – yet, there’s still tons of Chinese people immigrating here – particularly, the ones that like to parrot the message that ‘America is falling apart’.
“Because, guess what? If you’re a Chinese Communist Party official, where else are you gonna hide your money? Where else are you gonna put your kids in school? Are you gonna let them go study in Senegal or something?”
