Matthew Tye

Matthew Tye (born December 27, 1986), also known as Laowhy86 or C-Milk, is an American YouTuber, political commentator, and travel vlogger. He is a commentator about political and social issues in China. According to the Associated Press, Tye is a "vocal critic" of the Chinese government. Tye grew up in upstate New York and graduated from university in 2008. He received an offer to teach English as a second language in a school in Huizhou in the Chinese province of Guangdong, and promptly moved to China. Tye created a YouTube account in 2012. While working as an English teacher, he made videos about life in China and co-founded a motorcycle building shop (with Winston Sterzel) called Churchill Motorcycles, around 2015. With Sterzel, Tye explored northern and southern China on motorcycle and created two documentaries, Conquering Southern China and Conquering Northern China. While filming the second documentary, they were interrogated for a few hours by the Special Police Unit of the Chinese People's Armed Police Force in Inner Mongolia before being released. The police asked Tye and Sterzel whether they were journalists and had created illegal videos, both of which they denied. In early 2018, the public security bureau in Huizhou showed Tye's photograph in establishments frequented by foreigners as part of an investigation into his creation of an aerial video that they alleged to have shown a Huizhou military base. He decided to immediately leave China where he had lived for 10 years. Tye traveled to Hong Kong and then to the United States, where he settled down with his family in Los Angeles. His YouTube channel began discussing political and social topics related to China, such as human rights in China, attempts by the government to pay social media influencers to post propaganda videos, and the COVID-19 lab leak...