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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   25484 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 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.”

A quick Google search shows that 200,000 yuan is about 30,000 USD. I have more than that in my bank account. Great! So where do I go to find a Chinese bride? I can't, as far as I can tell. Or, rather, the process would be something ridiculous like learning Mandarin, applying for a visa, moving to China, courting local girls, and then paying for the car and apartment.

To understand why this is absurd, imagine if each time I wanted to buy a Chinese trinket, I had to move to China and haggle with the local shopkeeper in Cantonese on an open air market, instead of having merchants compete with each other to sell me Chinese gadgets every time I log onto Amazon or visit Walmart.

Libertarians economists write innumerable blog posts about the inefficiencies of the labor market caused by national borders, but much fewer posts about the inefficiencies in the dating market caused by the same. Though Bryan Caplan, at least, seems to have noticed.

Yes, I could just marry a Filipina, but Chinese women are more intelligent, and more beautiful.

Why would it be absurd to have to move to a place to date the women there?

Anyway you don't need to do all that, most foreigners in China in a relationship with a Chinese woman don't speak Chinese. I know a few actually where the woman learned English to be with her foreign bf/husband. Anyway there are plenty of eligible young women who speak English. And even more late 20s women who want to get married quick. A ten year tourist visa plus frequent visit or downloading a Chinese dating app would work. No foreigners pay money to buy an apartment in China either as a condition of getting married unless they are; A planning to live there forever or B rubes.

Actually if you go to China as a Western guy and can't get a date you're the most hopeless guy imaginable. Dating in China for white guys is the easiest thing in the world and Chinese women grade on a huge curve for autism.

What’s stopping you from moving to a city with universities offering masters programs that attract Chinese students?

You can easily meet a Chinese woman via a dating app if you are in the right college town / big city.

Bonus as a foreigner you probably won’t have to pay a bride price but may need to pony up for a big ring.

Yes, I could just marry a Filipina, but Chinese women are more intelligent, and more beautiful.

Filipinas are more well-endowed though.

The last thing I need is a wife with a bigger dick than mine

We're talking about the Philippines, not Thailand.

Flat is justice.

the process would be something ridiculous like learning Mandarin, applying for a visa, moving to China, courting local girls, and then paying for the car and apartment. To understand why this is absurd, imagine if each time I wanted to buy a Chinese trinket, I had to move to China and haggle with the local shopkeeper in Cantonese on an open air market

A wife is not a decorative item. Yes, you are in fact supposed to court a potential paramour if you want her to fall in love with you and commit to spending her life with you. Yes, making some effort to learn her language might be considered basic decency if you intend to make the same commitment to her (especially if her own English isn't that great). There is nothing "ridiculous" about any of this, and it's only a "market inefficiency" that you can't make a Chinese girl sign her life away to you sight unseen just by throwing money at her in the sense that it's a market inefficiency that slavery is currently illegal. If all you want is a sex slave who handles your housekeeping, then have the decency to say so without tarnishing the institution of marriage as modern western civilization understands it.

But I don't even think that is what you want, since you consider it important for your putative Chinese wife to be "intelligent", so I don't even know what you're talking about. If you actually want to marry a person and not just a pliable body, then yes, obviously you should court her and learn her language first! What's "ridiculous" about this?

Realistically, you could go to China on a tourist visa, speak no Mandarin, and still have no trouble finding a girl that will marry you within a month outside of the tier 1 cities

Mail order brides are an established thing, you can just reach out to the agencies that specialize in facilitating this if you specifically want a Chinawoman.

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