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. He graduated from Maine-Endwell High School in Endwell, New York, on June 25, 2005. After graduating from university in 2008, he wanted to explore the world. After spending a year in China, he lived in Taiwan for one and a half years, between 2010 and 2011, before moving back to China for 10years. In China, he spent several years in Inner Mongolia before returning to Guangdong. During his time in Taiwan, he was able to pay off his student loans in a year with the low cost of living and his income being between five and seven times more than what he would have earned in China. They started a family in Huizhou and owned an apartment.

Career

Start of YouTube channel Before becoming a YouTuber, Tye made rap music and performed at clubs in China including in Guangdong. After this, Tye started a YouTube channel named "Laowhy86", on April 20, 2012. The name "Laowhy" is a homophone for the Chinese term "Laowai", which means "foreigner". Around 2017, Tye uploaded a video of him talking about "language rapists" while he was strolling around Huizhou. In the video, which went viral, he said, "They see your white face or they see that you're a foreigner and assume they can learn English for free".

Motorcycle travel documentaries With business partners Winston Sterzel and Marty Schmidt, Tye established a custom motorcycle shop named Churchill Customs around 2015. Tye worked as the marketing and sales manager for the company.

Tye frequently rode his motorcycle across China, showcasing the material he filmed for his YouTube channel. Titled Conquering Southern China and released in August 2016, the first documentary featured Tye and Sterzel's motorcycle trip across of Southern China. Filmed over 15days, it was released in August 2016 in four segments on Vimeo. Conquering Southern China was directed by Ricardo Alfonso, who accompanied them in a car that trailed their motorcycles.

In 2017, they raised money on Kickstarter to film Conquering Northern China, their second documentary. By the end of March 2017, they had raised ¥282,000 (US$) from 1,200 people. They settled in Los Angeles, and in February he began making YouTube videos in the United States.

Shift to political and social commentator Once Tye moved to the United States, his YouTube channel moved from covering upbeat subject matter to delving into political and social issues in China.

Tye published a YouTube video on April 1, 2020, regarding the COVID-19 lab leak theory and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). In the video, he stated that a woman had responded to a WIV job posting shortly prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, called her the likely patient zero, and named her as the student Huang Yanling; Tye said she had vanished. In an op-ed for CNBC, Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Drexel said that Tye had "discerning criticism" of the World Health Organization's actions regarding China. In the same op-ed, Wolfowitz and Drexel claimed that Tye was subjected to an endless stream of cyberharassment from "wumao" and Chinese Communist Party supporters. Branding him as a white supremacist, they were able to cut into his income and viewership by "demonetiz[ing]" his YouTube uploads. Tye's sponsorships, which made up most of his revenue, were severely cut after companies became worried about offending China. In 2022, Tye made videos about how China had backed Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.

In 2021, the company Hong Kong Pear Technology emailed many YouTubers, including Tye and Sterzel, offering to pay them for posting on their accounts an ad for Hainan province, which is frequented by tourists for its beaches. Pretending to be enticed by the company's proposal, they responded and received another proposal to share a propaganda video. The first COVID-19 case was identified in China. Claiming that COVID-19 came from a white-tailed deer, the disinformation video falsely claimed that the disease did not begin in China. The company ceased communication after Tye and Sterzel requested sources to validate the company's incorrect assertions. The duo cited their interaction with the company as demonstrating China's ability to spread disinformation by paying off influencers. Tye's criticisms have been called by Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Drexel of the American Enterprise Institute "discerning" and have cited his experiences and criticisms in their own critiques of the Chinese Communist Party and the response to COVID-19 by the World Health Organization.