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What China’s Dating Market Says About Today’s China
As you can probably tell, I follow almost every corner of Chinese society. One of the most revealing is online dating consultation.
The format is strikingly standardized. It often feels less like courtship than an investment committee reviewing an investment project.
First: age.
For women, younger is better. For men, the discounting begins at 30.
Then: family wealth.
Households wealth of the entire family are graded A6, A7, A8, A9 and above. A7.5 means roughly RMB 5 million in assets. A8.2 means about RMB 20 million. Divide by seven for a rough US-dollar figure.
Then come the balance-sheet questions of the individual:
Do you own an apartment? A car? Is there a mortgage? How much debt remains?
Appearance is scored next. Five is ordinary. Five-and-a-half is the best-looking person in a class of 40. Six is among the best-looking in an entire year.
Then occupation. Today, 体制内—employment inside the Party-state system—carries a substantial premium.
Family background is also marked up or down. Divorced parents are a negative. Parents without pensions are a negative.
Geography has its own hierarchy: Beijing and Shanghai, provincial capitals, smaller cities, counties and villages.
Everything is priced, ranked and discounted.
What shocks me is not simply the materialism. It is how little room leaves for emotion.
Hollywood may have oversold “follow your heart.” But watching marriage reduced almost entirely to asset matching, downside protection and possible marrying up the social ladder—is unsettling in a different way.
There seems to be a growing consensus in China that, in a slowing economy, you cannot afford to lead with your heart. Marriage is increasingly treated as a risk-management exercise. Security matters more than possibility. That is one reason a government job now carries such enormous appeal: lower upside, perhaps, but a much smaller perceived risk of falling.
Perhaps I am being nostalgic.
The China of the 1990s and 2000s felt like a young person looking up at the sky, imagining how far the future might carry them.
Today’s young Chinese seem more often to be looking down at the ground, calculating each step—and making sure the next one does not send them over a cliff.