by Roseann Lake
From a research perspective, the idea of online dating in China fascinated me. Numerically, it was impressive—the Chinese online dating industry is the second largest in the world after the United States, and generated US $1.6 billion in sales according to iResearch figures for 2016. Yet beyond the economics of the industry, in a culture where parents and family members still retain such a strong hold on the marital prospects of their offspring but where young people have taken to the Internet so fervently, the advent of online dating seemed like an explosive opportunity for change. To find out just how much it had altered the dating landscape, I scheduled a meeting with Rose Gong, founder and co-CEO of China’s most famous dating portal, Jiayuan.com.
Gong is a petite and unassuming woman who created a formidable dating empire, almost by mistake. It was born in her dorm room at the prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai, when she was in full leftover-woman splendor: twenty-seven, single, and studying for a master’s degree in journalism. Worried that her bookworm tendencies would prevent her from meeting anyone to date on campus, she turned to the Internet. Upon discovering that the dating sites she had signed up for contained fake profiles and pictures, she taught herself to use Microsoft Office Front-Page, and created her own online dating platform. Gong started small, with only five users, including a timid PhD student who was researching fruit flies. She personally helped him edit his profile, claiming that as it was, it would fail to get the attention of any women.
Now with nearly 90 million cumulative accounts since its launch in 2003, her site is traded on NASDAQ (DATE), and has earned her the much-coveted title of “China’s #1 Matchmaker.”
Though her sheng nü days are behind her (the fruit-fly PhD is now the stay-at-home dad to their young daughter), Gong still has a soft spot for leftover ladies, affirming in an interview, “Most of these so-called leftover women have voluntarily chosen their lifestyle,” and stressing, “It’s very important to know yourself and what you want before choosing a life partner.”
When I sat down with Rose Gong, one of the first things I did was congratulate her: “In a country where the mate search is so often restricted to parents, matchmakers, friends, and colleagues, you’ve broadened the search parameters. You’ve allowed millions of young Chinese to—quite literally—search for a mate on their own terms.” Gong looked at me, puzzled. “That wasn’t my intention at all,” she replied. “I just thought that with all of the rural-to-urban migration happening across China, people were losing their traditional networks for finding a partner due to geographic distances. I wanted to fill that void.”
And indeed, Gong, as I discovered, was surprisingly no-frills about the mate search. She ascribed heavily to “men dang hu dui,” or as mentioned earlier, the concept of “matching doors and matching windows,” which has guided matchmakers for centuries. This is apparent on her site, where users can search for mates with parameters like the very popular “salary” function. “It’s not there to cater to gold-digging women,” she insists. “It just works as a doorstep—the bare minimum a man needs to pass, in order to be considered suitable,” she explained. “With hundreds of thousands of users in your city, how else do you begin to narrow things down?”
I asked if it was common for parents to play an active role in the online dating lives of their children and was told by a Jiayuan employee that most of the women signed up on the site are under accounts registered by their mothers. She explained that many singles are even too busy to try to date online—that, or they allowed their parents to create a profile for them as a way of getting them off their backs and alleviating some of the marriage pressure they face. This didn’t come as a shock given previous conversations with Christy and June, though I was surprised to learn it was also true for men. Given his salary and general eligibility as a bachelor, my friend Guang had been automatically bumped to diamond status on Jiayuan.com, which means that women had to pay more to message him. (One of the ways that Jiayuan.com monetizes is by offering its more cash-flush users “menus” of the different categories of singles they can pay to access.) Guang had originally filled out his own profile, but then his dad asked to see it. “He made some very aggressive edits,” said Guang. “He put an end to my hookups.”
During my visit to the Jiayuan.com offices, I was told by Gong’s assistant that the website also sponsored many offline events where members could get the chance to meet and mingle. There was one coming up at a huge shopping mall on the west side of the city, and she said I could attend if I wanted to observe how it was organized.
I ran the idea by Beibei, and even though neither of us was in the market for a Chinese boyfriend, we decided to go. When we arrived (about an hour after the event had started), we located the large open space in the middle of the mall where the event was being held. There were bouquets of flowers and a cheerful MC who made announcements through a blaring wireless headset. But where were all of the merry mingling singles? They were at “the wall.” On a stretch of sheetrock that was littered with notes, we saw hundreds of profiles of young Chinese singles—men and women—advertising their age, occupation, salary, and QQ number. Much to my amazement, 70 percent of the people at the event just swarmed this area, flipping through different sheets of paper, which, by this point, were so numerous they were overlapping. The wall was divided, with blue sheets on the left from boys, pink sheets on the right from girls. Young Chinese singles (and at least a few parents) were packed in around it, using the zoom functions on their cell phones to see more clearly if they couldn’t get close enough to the wall, and taking pictures of the profiles they found most interesting.
Working my way through the pack, I was dumbstruck. Why were the men and women checking out small bits of colored paper instead of talking to one another? Beibei kept her head down and stayed out of the fray. “This is why I can’t date Chinese,” she said. All eyes were on the wall.
I noticed a man in a newsboy hat nervously looking at the young woman next to him. From what I could tell, he was trying to do the unthinkable and . . . speak with her! The crowd was so tight, it was easy to remain close enough to eavesdrop, so I did. The young man made eye contact with his female target.
“How old are you?” he asked, without even saying hello.
The girl looked flustered, flashed a nervous semi-smile, and turned away into the crowd without responding.
“Next time, you might want to try a less invasive line,” I said to him in Chinese, trying to look sympathetic because I got the feeling he was genuinely clueless.
He looked back at me, startled. I was the only foreigner at the event, and clearly the last person he expected to get dating advice from.
“You can even just say, ‘Hey, I’m X, what’s your name?’ ” I said.
“I guess I could,” he said timidly. “But I usually just ask the age first, because if it’s not suitable, there’s no need to move forward.”
The man honestly didn’t seem to understand that his search parameter pickup line wasn’t the best way to get a response. Judging by the sprinkling of hairs on his chin, I decided that he was still young and would eventually learn the error of his ways. “Well, next time, just for fun, try something else,” I told him, making an escape. Beibei, who had witnessed the entire thing, was howling with laughter in the corner.
As I ventured away from the wall, I discovered a much less concentrated area populated by a handful of cougars, the requisite patches of seedy old men, and a few mother-daughter teams plotting their next move. Mothers seemed universally more excited to be at the event than their daughters. In my conversations with them, I noticed the recurrence of the phrase zhao gu , which means “to look after.” Beyond the basics of being able to boast of a son-in-law and eventual grandchild, I could sense that these mothers wanted to find husbands for their daughters so someone would take care of them once their parents passed away. And as unromantic as it sounds, I didn’t blame them.
China isn’t set up for the single or the childless. For cent
uries it has been a country where the family unit has unflappably served as the supreme unit of social organization, leaving those who live on its fringes to fend for themselves. A chilling example of the flaws of this paradigm is the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed nearly 70,000 people, with another 18,000 reported missing. Though no exact numbers are available, a large percentage of the deceased were children who perished under the shoddy construction of their school buildings, creating China’s earliest example of what would later come to be known as shidu, which literally translates as “lose only,” or parents who had lost their only child. As Mei Fong writes in her stirring and meticulously reported book One Child, “The unmarried and the childless are very low on the societal totem pole.” She describes how shidu parents found themselves struggling to get into nursing homes and to buy burial plots because their lack of a child to fund and make decisions about care or funeral arrangements were seen as a liability.
Given China’s lack of a social safety net, shidu parents are also more financially vulnerable than peers who have progeny, and as Fong notes, more prone to depression. The bias against them will have to change in order to protect the elderly (shidu support groups suggested using money from violations of the one-child policy to support couples made childless by tragedy, though that idea never got traction), but even broader reforms must be made to accommodate further strains on the traditional configuration of the nuclear family as a result of the country’s impending gender imbalance. Beyond the fact that it will soon become numerically impossible for everyone in China to be married and have offspring, it must also be considered that young Chinese—women, especially—are developing a much lower tolerance for marriage for the sake of marriage.
As I spoke with the daughters of the concerned mothers, they confirmed this. They were much more likely to mention things like “common interests” “travel” and “chemistry” in conversations about their search for a partner. They were looking for other halves with whom they could hike or play badminton, backpack around a foreign country, and enjoy as a source of shared laughter and the occasional frisson. The idea of growing old alone troubled them—one told me that she planned to purchase an investment property as a nest egg—but they didn’t seem willing to compromise on their partner out of fear. Many spoke good English and were middle-class Beijing natives or current residents (hence the proximity and presence of their mothers), so they had fewer financial concerns and could focus more squarely on their feelings.
On the ride back from our offline dating safari, Beibei told me about the last local she had been introduced to by her family. He was thirty-seven, had never married, and had a good job at a Japanese company in Beijing. “He’s really into anime,” she said, “which was cool, until I got to know him better.” It turns out that Beibei’s parents and potential in-laws were so keen to have the young couple married, they conspired to send their children away on an all-expenses paid trip—a preemptive honeymoon, of sorts—to Chengdu, home of China’s beloved pandas. Things went OK until their first evening together at the hotel. All along, Beibei had a hunch that her date wasn’t the most virile character she’d ever met, but the contents of his suitcase confirmed her suspicions. “He brought a teddy bear to sleep with on our trip,” she said. “It’s like Mr. Bean, no?” I couldn’t help but laugh at the image of minxy Beibei sharing a bed with the Chinese version of Mr. Bean.
Hearing Beibei speak, echoes of conversations I’d had with Christy, June, and Zhang Mei rang through my ears. Like them, she has worked hard to pursue her passions and build a fulfilling life for herself. As an accomplished artist and designer at an international luxury hotel, Beibei has created a nice life for herself. She is keen to share it with someone, but walks a fine line between finding that person on her own terms and her obligation to be respectful of her parents’ wishes and society’s timelines.
“My parents tried hard to pair me up with this guy because we’ve known his family for a long time and he owns a house in a very good area,” she said. “But I can’t imagine that my life would be any happier with him in it or that he’d be any happier with me in his, so I don’t see the point. We’d each be better off adopting a panda!”
7
HIGHER CALLINGS
A homely wife is a treasure.
—CHINESE PROVERB
Dr. Kaiping Peng, the founding chair of the Department of Psychology at China’s Tsinghua University, has a theory. Based loosely on Maslow’s pyramid of needs, he argues that when a country reaches a certain level of prosperity, the focus of people’s needs shifts from being primarily material (food, shelter, clothing) to psychological (spirituality, happiness, self-fulfillment). While he acknowledges that there are certainly exceptions, he maintains that the theory adapts itself especially well to China, where between 2000 and 2016, the size of the middle class grew from 5 million people to 225 million.
“We’re going to see an increasingly greater interest in personal health and well-being, art, innovation, and film,” he explains. “Why do you think China is facing a surge in ethnic conflicts? Because its people are looking for an identity.”
Along with the search for identity, argues Peng, is the drive to be self-actualized. He explains that self-actualization is a complex and coveted cocktail of personal growth, achievement, love, and respect that only about 30 percent of the world’s population is able to fully achieve. His bet on who might come the closest in China? Young women.
“The Chinese economic miracle has two secrets,” he says. The first are migrant workers, and the second are young, educated women. “You can go to Pudong in Shanghai, you can go to Beijing’s Central Business District; of all the international corporations there, I’d say 70 percent of the local employees are young Chinese women. They generally have better English language abilities, they are smart, hardworking, professional, and at ease in global environments. They’ve been very beneficial to Chinese development; I don’t think many Chinese people realize that.”
Still, for as much as he defends young Chinese women, Peng spends his days turning them away. In charge of recruitment for Tsinghua’s psychology department, he estimates that 80 percent of job applicants are female. Most of them have stellar backgrounds—doctoral degrees from Yale and Harvard, excellent references, and impressive publishing histories. Most of them, Peng also acknowledges, are single.
On paper, these women are pushing toward the upper echelon of the self-actualization pyramid. But as unmarried women, they teeter toward the bottom half of what is socially acceptable in China. What might explain the discrepancy? “These women represent the vanguard of social development in China,” says Peng. “They have high standards and they have high expectations,” he adds, “and the rest of the country hasn’t quite caught up to them.”
Indeed, nearly a year into her contract at one of Beijing’s mightiest law firms, June realized that she had clocked hundreds of overtime hours and hadn’t been paid for a single one. Despite warnings from several colleagues against rocking the boat and receiving negative feedback, she copied all of her emails to a USB drive as evidence of the many late-night work hours she had been putting in, and requested the overtime compensation that was clearly outlined in her contract. In response, her boss threatened to sue her and ask for damages, claiming that by copying her emails to a USB drive, she was in effect stealing intellectual property. Unfazed, June called him out on his “BS legal argument,” reminding him that she hadn’t leaked any information to any external party. In the ultimate test of her litigation skills, following several heated arguments, June was finally issued the equivalent of six months’ salary in overtime payments, and promptly filed her resignation letter.
For perspective on where women like June figure into the grand scheme of China’s development, it’s helpful to understand the historical place of Chinese women over the past hundred years. Until at least 1906, most Chinese women had their feet bound. Until 1950, they were sold in marriage to the highest bidder. Then
there was the Great Famine (1958–1961), which took the lives of over 30 million people and during which it wasn’t uncommon for party officials and militia to rape women at will while making their rounds of different communes. Things took a sharp turn in the Cultural Revolution during the ’60s and ’70s, a time when China had one of the highest female employment rates in the world. Almost overnight, women became “sexless comrades,” laboring shoulder to shoulder with men for the greater good of the nation. From a gender viewpoint, this is a special period in Chinese history, the unique conditions of which likely served as the breeding grounds for many of the self-made female billionaires that China has become so famous for, although it came at a huge cost. An estimated 2 million lives were lost during the Revolution, as the result of persecution, torture, violence, and humiliation that began during the bloody summer of 1966, and carried on for a decade.
After Mao’s death in 1976, circumstances began to improve. Schools and universities reopened, although the onset of a more sedate period of economic reform and the cultural re-gentrification that accompanied it required that women resume their more traditionally feminine position in society, almost as if nothing had happened. And therein lies the rub: Chinese women have never had their own true feminist revolution—most of the greater opportunities they gained to more actively participate in society were imposed on them, and as a result, could just as easily be taken away.
Until now.
As the world’s second largest economy after the United States (in terms of nominal GNP), China has grown at an unprecedented rate, but to avoid losing its position on the global economic leaderboard, it needs to focus on maintaining its size—something it cannot do without the full engagement of its women. This is especially true since one of the country’s strongest engines of growth—its power in numbers—is on the wane. Figures from the National Bureau of Statistics of the Chinese Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security show that China’s working-age population has been shrinking every year since 2012. Between 2016 and 2030, it is expected to shrink from just over 900 million to 870 million, before dropping to 700 million by 2050. These falling numbers are the logical result of the one-child policy, which has reduced the size of China’s overall population, but there’s more to it. As China’s workforce shrinks, the employment preferences of its workforce are changing. With greater access to higher education, Chinese workers are less likely to want to be employed in the manufacturing sectors that once catapulted their nation’s economy to new heights. More want jobs in the service and finance economy, which China is in the process of transitioning to.