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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17241 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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Time for another dating market piece

From a non-Western angle this time. I enjoyed* this article on the Chinese dating market and its increasing level of dysfunction

*which is to say, I liked the information I gained. I did not at all enjoy reading it as it has the most irritating style known to man, a turbo Linkedin style piece by someone who thinks they are vastly more profound than they actually are. Do not read it. I have excerpted the interesting bits below:

Here’s a translated message from a Chinese woman to a man who confessed his feelings for her, sent via WeChat, which you should read as the mission statement for everything that follows:

“You chose me because of my appearance. I can also reject you because of your appearance. I’m telling you honestly, I’ve never been pursued by someone as ugly as you in my entire life. This isn’t just venting; it’s my genuine feeling, from the bottom of my heart. Ever since you confessed to me, I’ve felt incredibly inferior every day. Do you think Liu Yifei or Fan Bingbing would be pursued by someone like you? You wouldn’t pursue them, because you know those beauties wouldn’t be interested in you. But you’re pursuing me, which means that in your eyes, I’m a match for your looks. My God, just thinking about it gives me a vague urge to kill someone. I beg you to stop liking me. Your pursuit has deeply hurt my self-esteem.”

In 2010, a 22-year-old model named Ma Nuo appeared on If You Are the One (非诚勿扰), China’s most-watched dating show: fifty million viewers per episode, second only to the state news broadcast in ratings. An unemployed male contestant asked if she’d ride bicycles with him. She replied, with a small giggle that would become the most replayed giggle in Chinese internet history, that she’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the back of a bicycle.

The country detonated. Government censors ordered the show reformatted. The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television issued regulations. A dating show required state intervention in the way that famines and insurrections require state intervention, because it was threatening social stability in exactly the same way.

Ma Nuo later revealed that the contestant wasn’t actually poor. He was a wealthy second-generation student studying abroad. The production crew had asked her to reject him. The BMW line was a joke she’d read online

In Zhengzhou, a Foxconn worker told a researcher: “The groom’s family is expected to provide a car and a new apartment. That’s more than 200,000 yuan. Our average farming income is 5,000 yuan a year.” He paused. “Having two sons,” he said, “is considered bad luck. It means you have to provide two apartments.”

The caili (彩礼), the betrothal gift, was originally symbolic: a gesture of respect to the bride’s family. Red envelopes. Dried fruits. Perhaps a pig

By 2023, the national average caili had risen to 69,000 RMB ($9,500). In Zhejiang province: 183,000 RMB. In rural Jiangxi: 380,000 RMB, not including the apartment, not including the car.

The state tried to intervene. Jiangsu capped caili at 50,000 RMB. Gansu tried similar limits. One county in Jiangxi tied caili compliance to school enrollment priority for your children, meaning if you paid too much bride price, your kids might not get into the right school. The state was literally bribing (blackmailing) families to accept smaller bribes for their daughters.

The sociologist Hu Hsien-chin made a distinction between two kinds of face: mianzi (social prestige from visible achievement and display) and lian (moral standing granted by others for your character). You can have high mianzi and no lian, everyone can see your Porsche and also know you’re a fraud. The marriage market optimizes for mianzi because mianzi is legible. Lian is subjective

Xiao Tao (“Little Peach”) streams from 8pm to midnight. She does not take her clothes off. She talks. She plays mobile games while talking. She reads comments aloud and responds to them. She calls her regulars da ge (“big brother”). When a da ge sends a virtual gift, she reacts with what appears to be genuine delight. When a big gift arrives, the animated cruise ship, the rocket, the supercar she gasps and says the sender’s username and thanks them by name, and 200,000 viewers see this, and the man who sent the gift receives, in exchange for 3,000 RMB, approximately forty seconds of being known .

The state has started cracking down on “excessive virtual gifting” as a social stability concern. Platforms are now required to cap daily gifting limits. This is not a coincidence. The state understands, even if it won’t say so, that the livestream economy is what happens when you price 30 million men out of the marriage market. They don’t riot. They buy virtual cruise ships for women in Chengdu.

A 2010 census showed 82.44% of Chinese men aged 20-29 had never married, fifteen percentage points above women in the same bracket. Demographers projected 29-33 million surplus males in the coming decades.

Historical records on what happens to surplus male populations are consistent and not reassuring. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, bare branches “tended to drift from their hometowns and form brotherhoods, secret societies, bandit gangs, and military groups.” In extreme cases they toppled dynasties.

There are men who have been publicly shamed on Weibo for insufficient gift-giving. Birthday posts where the gifts are deemed, in comments, to be “not even trying.” Proposals live-streamed to followers where the ring is evaluated in real time. One man proposed in a restaurant while his girlfriend’s phone filmed it for her followers. The comments started arriving before he’d finished the sentence. The comments were not all positive. He could see them arriving on the phone screen while he was still on one knee.

This is cuihun (催婚). Relentless familial pressure to marry. It arrives with seasonal regularity, like the flu, and with roughly similar symptoms.

On Taobao, you can rent a boyfriend or girlfriend. Prices: 50 RMB per hour to watch a movie together. 100 RMB if it’s a horror film, because physical contact is implied and must be priced in. 3,000-plus yuan per day for the full meet-the-parents package. During Spring Festival, prices surge to 10,000 yuan per day.

In 2007, the All-China Women’s Federation, a state agency ostensibly created to advance women’s rights (and fully nails the aesthetic of the ‘The Supreme People's Assembly’ in North Korea), officially classified unmarried women over 27 as “sheng nu” (剩女): leftover women. The Ministry of Education added the term to the official lexicon.

The Federation then published taxonomies:

Ages 25-27: “Leftover fighters” (they still have courage!)

Ages 28-30: “The ones who must triumph” (this is a pun on Pizza Hut’s Chinese name, because what Chinese feminist propaganda needs is more fast food wordplay)

Ages 31-35: “Advanced leftover”

Ages 35+: “Master class of leftover women” (a reference to the Monkey King, which is definitely not insulting)

In 2011, the Women’s Federation published “Leftover Women Do Not Deserve Our Sympathy.” It included this sentence: “Pretty girls do not need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family. But girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult. These girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness.”

A state agency for women’s rights published that. In 2011. Not 1951.

Marriage registrations fell to 6.1 million in 2024, down a fifth year-over-year. Births fell to 7.92 million in 2025 as deaths rose to 11.31 million. China’s population is now actively shrinking. The fertility rate is 1.0 and falling. The women called “leftover” turned out to be the ones who could afford to say no.

China is no longer poor. But it behaves, in the intimate sphere, like a country that expects the famine to return. Houses are hoarded like grain. Children are invested in like they’re the last crop before winter. Partners are evaluated like wartime rations. The marriage market runs on the logic of scarcity even amid abundance, because the nervous system was built during scarcity and nervous systems don’t update when the spreadsheet does.

Speaking from my own experience, the article is a touch overwrought. I'm in a major bubble - I haven't lived there for years, I was a foreigner, and all the expats I know now are successful families with children the same age as ours - but so is the person who uses anecdotes from TV shows and marriage markets. Nonetheless, there is some obvious truth here, given the collapse in marriage and fertility rates in the country.

There does seem to be an inherent contradiction in streaming, with the author assuming the government are both using it as a substitute for human affection, while also trying to crack down on gifting and parasocial relationships. Which is it? Perhaps this is a flaw of the CCP themselves, pulling in multiple directions and unable to find a fix for their country's broken dating market.

In general I think the article gets some things right but is somewhat a miss. For one despite the excess men is not evenly spread at all the cities are full of eligible young women who are often not dating as well. I teach at a Chinese university and so have a front row seat to the Chinese dating scene and many of my female students are ambivalent or hostile to the idea of marriage or children. The thing is these girls would be stupid easy to date. Any Western guy under the age of 35 or so could easily pick up most of them get married and have two kids.

Chinese society is not really set up for dating for one women are generally expected to work but also often take care of relatives because of the one child policy this can create big burden on the wife. She'll often be expected to move into a small apartment with her inlaws and then look after her own parents on top of that plus probably one kid. That's a lot of pressure when you could just not marry and maintain your freedom. It doesn't always happen but the expectation of the inlaws and a traditional family supported society with few children creates a big pressure valve.

Chinese guys have no game, I mean some do but in general Chinese university students act like high schoolers and often shy middle schoolers. I have trouble getting university aged guys to work with the girls. I often can't get them to be in randomly placed groups with them without threats of marking down their participation grade and even then they are often too scared to talk to them. This isn't so surprising when you realize dating is banned in virtually all Chinese high schools and I've even seen schools go as far as making the girls cut their hair to make them more androgynous. and dating isn't just banned Chinese high school students don't have time to date because they are chained to their desk studying all day everyday. So how do they develop those skills? Many do but many don't I still know plenty of eligible women under 35 who any westerner could pick up and yet they don't have any prospects they just quietly work their office jobs. Some will quickly get a semi-arranged marriage when they feel they are aging out but many don't. You'd think in a country with so many men they'd go for them. But a lot of Chinese men won't date leftover women.

China's gender gap is even weirder than it first appears because men and women are in different places the excess men are in the countryside in places with very few women and doomed to being single unless they can get a bride from southeast Asia, while most of China's cities are majority women especially among the younger cohort. Which again makes dating these women incredibly easy because the gender ratio of where the women are favors men.

Lastly the gold digger type women referenced in this do exist and a weird thing about China versus western culture is how openly materialistic you are allowed to be. But they likely won't have trouble dating as they are willing to doll themselves up and put themselves out their in a way a lot of meek women working in offices aren't. I wouldn't say the BMW girl is the norm though, plenty of my students have directly referenced themselves in opposition ot that as it's a well known meme in China as well.

Most chinese guys have absolutely 0 game and know it and therefore don't put themselves out there, the few who have game drown in pussy and are either snapped up off the market early if they're good men or play the field like absolute fuckboys, and the rest disappear into trial and error hell till about early 30s (based on my last info from about 2022). Maybe things are much more hellish now - Korea seems to be the reference point for how bad things can get for men regarding the status competition and expectation management- but I honestly think theres just standard oversampling of horrible dating stories endemic to all societies.

Though one obscure fact unspoken here is the absolute totalization of wechat and Line in Korea facilitated dating dynamics. I've had weird fucking experiences back in the 2010s with chinese women getting INSANELY distressed if I was using wechat and not responding to them immediately. The suspicion seemed to be that I was shaking for whores in my vicinity, which is a feature native to wechat so the assumption was not out of the question. Not sure if the new features like digital app payments on app have made sugardaddyfication even more instant. Maybe mainland posters, if any, can share dynamics I'm likely getting wrong here, but theres just something that was weird about using wechat as the single ur app to mediate all interactions.

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