Serpentza

I am very pleased to have an excuse for including some of my old photos of Shenzhen! 

Recently a friend of mine told me that Serpentza, a video blogger (or "vlogger") based in Shenzhen, has finally decided that he is going to leave China. He is fed up with living in the Middle Kingdom. Well, I watched the most recent Serpentza video and I thought to myself, “What a twit!” 

I used to respect Serpentza a lot because he made a big effort to learn Mandarin, an incredibly difficult language that I never mastered. Well, he did live in China for fourteen years, he made quite a lot of money out of China, in one way or another, and he did get to meet some pretty Chinese girls, so you would think that he might be just a tiny bit grateful. But when he started making videos that said that all Chinese girls are "easy" and then he made some more videos criticizing the Chinese Communist Party, what happened? The CCP was not happy. Wow! What an amazing surprise! Whoever would have guessed that the Chinese government might be unhappy about a foreigner whingeing about them on the Internet?

If you were to go to Qatar and start telling everybody that Islam is rubbish and the Sheikh is a twit, what would happen? If you went to Russia and you started finding fault with Mr. Putin, would that be okay? If you went to India, moaned about Hinduism and killed a few cows, would you be popular? Or am I being stuffy and old-fashioned by suggesting that it is actually bad manners to slag off your host country and its government?

Serpentza originally came from South Africa and we all know what a happy, calm and peaceful place SA is. Now he says that he is going to the USA. Thank goodness there is such wonderful racial harmony in America, as well as a wise and truthful president in Mr. Trump! I am sure that America is a safe and peaceful country because no one has a gun or the Coronavirus and free healthcare is available to every American. 

But maybe Serpentza will soon start making nasty videos about America, his new adopted country, as he certainly seems to be a snake-in-the-grass. 

Well, I have said it before and I am going to say it again. Irena and I really enjoyed our five years in China. We look back on our time in Shenzhen as one of the best and happiest times in our lives. We really miss our Chinese friends and in some ways it would have been better if we had never left. As for the Chinese government, no, I am not their biggest fan. When we first arrived in China, we had to leave again and we could not come back for another nine weeks. 

But let us try to look at it another way. Has China ever been a working democracy? Could a democracy really work, if there are 1.4 billion citizens? Maybe the CCP is better than anarchy and anarchy is what China had to endure for some periods of its history. If you have read a little about the Rape of Nanjing and some of the other ghastly things that have happened in Cha's history, then I think that you will understand why most Chinese people want some safety and security. Democracy is just a strange western thing for weirdo laowai (foreigners), like eating bread instead of rice and using knives and forks instead of chopsticks.