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Why I left China for Good!

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Fourteen years in Shenzhen ended with one video and a one-way ticket out.

On July 3, 2020, South African YouTuber Winston Sterzel — known to nearly a million subscribers as SerpentZA — posted “Why I left China for Good!,” a video laying out exactly why he packed up a life he’d built in China since the mid-2000s. Sterzel wasn’t some tourist blogger; he became one of the most recognizable foreign vloggers in the country and co-created the “ADVChina” motorcycle travel series with fellow expat creator Matthew Tye, better known as Laowhy86. This video is his account of why that chapter had to close.

• Sterzel relocated to Shenzhen in the mid-2000s and spent 14 years building a life and a following in China before deciding to leave for good.
• He cites deteriorating safety, shrinking personal freedom, and the inability to speak or film without fear of state surveillance as the decisive factors.
• The departure followed rising tension in late 2018 and 2019, including the detention of foreign nationals such as his business associate Michael Spavor, which pushed both Sterzel and Tye out of mainland China and into the United States.

A Life Built From the Ground Up in Shenzhen

Sterzel didn’t arrive in China as a skeptic. He moved to Shenzhen with genuine enthusiasm for the country, learned the language, built a business, and turned his outsider perspective into a channel that documented daily life, road trips, and the contradictions of modern China for a Western audience. Over 14 years, that curiosity turned into a career, and his partnership with Matthew Tye on the “ADVChina” motorcycle documentaries made both men fixtures in the foreign-vlogger scene inside the country.

That’s what makes the video’s title land differently than a typical “I’m leaving” announcement. Sterzel is explicit that this wasn’t disillusionment from day one — it was a slow accumulation of pressure that eventually outweighed everything he’d built. The tightening he describes wasn’t abstract policy chatter; it was the day-to-day reality of trying to run a camera and a YouTube channel inside an increasingly surveilled environment.

The Breaking Points He Names

In the video, Sterzel organizes his reasoning around a handful of specific themes rather than a vague sense of unease. He points to the deteriorating safety and suitability of the country for raising children, the value he places on individual freedom, and — most pointedly — his inability to speak or film openly without worrying about state surveillance and retaliation against him or people around him.

Only now am I able to truly talk about all the things I saw, filmed and experienced in China.

That line, delivered near the top of the video, frames everything that follows. Sterzel says leaving gave him the editorial independence to describe things he had previously self-censored to protect himself, his family, and his contacts still living inside the country. It’s a distinction that matters: this isn’t a foreigner speculating about China from afar, it’s someone recounting what he says he witnessed firsthand for over a decade and only felt safe naming after he’d left.

Spavor’s Detention and the Exit From the Mainland

The timeline Sterzel lays out traces back to late 2018 and 2019, a period of rising tension for foreigners in China that included the detention of Michael Spavor, a business associate of Sterzel’s. That detention, alongside broader security concerns during that stretch, was enough to push both Sterzel and Matthew Tye to leave mainland China altogether and relocate to the United States. The move to Trump’s executive action ending preferential treatment for Hong Kong and the broader hardening of Beijing’s posture toward foreign nationals and outside scrutiny during that same window is the backdrop against which Sterzel says his own calculus changed — from managing risk while living inside the system to deciding the risk wasn’t worth managing anymore.

He’s careful to frame the freedom versus safety trade-off as the core of the decision: raising a family in an environment he no longer considered secure, weighed against the professional and personal ties he’d spent 14 years building. For Sterzel, safety and the ability to speak candidly won out, and relocating outside China’s borders is what finally let him say so on camera.

The tension he describes fits into a wider pattern of foreign nationals and businesses recalculating their exposure inside China during that period, a dynamic that’s shown up elsewhere in coverage of Beijing’s posture toward Taiwan and its own restive regions.

Speaking Freely for the First Time

What separates this video from a standard expat farewell post is Sterzel’s insistence that leaving physically was the precondition for speaking honestly. He says outright that stories he’d sat on for years — things “seen, filmed and experienced” — only became tellable once he was outside the reach of retaliation. That’s the throughline of the whole video: not just why he left, but why he couldn’t have told you any of this while he was still there.