A few days before the Year of the Dragon began, Jiayuan (Beautiful Destiny), China’s largest online dating service, summoned new employees to an orientation meeting at its headquarters, in a Beijing office tower. Over the holiday, single men and women across the country would be returning home to visit relatives—only to find themselves interrogated relentlessly about marriage prospects. For some, the pressure would be unbearable. Afterward, Jiayuan’s enrollment would experience a surge similar to the New Year’s surge at fitness clubs in America.
Gong Haiyan, the company’s founder and co-C.E.O., peered at a dozen new hires and informed them that they were now in “the happiness business.” She did not smile. When Gong, who is thirty-six, talks about the happiness business, she tends to emphasize “price/performance ratios” and “information asymmetry.” The company, which she founded in her dorm room nine years ago, in order to find a husband, accounts for a sizable portion of China’s online dating industry and is traded on Nasdaq. It goes by the tagline “The Serious Dating Website.”
Gong was in office attire: glasses, ponytail, no makeup, and a pink Adidas jacket with a ragged left cuff. The young men and women before her were joining a staff of nearly five hundred. Your customers, she told them, will be virtually indistinguishable from yourselves: strivers, alone in the city, separated from love by “three towering mountains”—no money, no time, and no connections.
I met Gong six years ago, after she received a master’s degree in journalism and entered the dating business. She was nothing like the other Web entrepreneurs I’ve come to know in China. For one thing, the top ranks of Chinese technology are dominated by men. And, unlike others who glimpsed the potential of the Internet in China, she didn’t speak fluent English. She didn’t even have a degree in computer science. She’d grown up on a farm, and her voice trembled before crowds. She was five feet three, with narrow shoulders, and when she talked about her business I got the feeling that she was talking about herself. “We’re not like you foreigners, who make friends easily in a bar or go travelling and chat up a stranger,” she once told me. “This is not about messing around for fun. Our membership has a very clear goal: to get married.”
Of all the upheavals in Chinese life in the past three decades, there is perhaps none more intimate than the opportunity to choose one’s mate. For years, village matchmakers and parents, factory bosses and Communist cadres efficiently paired off young people with minimum participation from the bride and groom. Romance became political in 1919, when Chinese students mounted demonstrations for democracy, science, and an end to arranged marriage, on behalf of what they called “the freedom of love.” It was “a code word for individual autonomy,” Haiyan Lee, a literature professor at Stanford, writes in “Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950.” Mao outlawed arranged marriages and concubines, and enshrined a woman’s right to divorce, but he left no room for desire. Dating that did not lead to the altar was “hooliganism,” he said, and under his system sexual privacy was nonexistent; local Party cadres kept track of household condom distribution.
Arranged marriages were banned in 1950, but twenty years later, when the anthropologist Yan Yunxiang moved to a village in China’s northeast, local women had so little say regarding whom they married that they sobbed when they left home on their wedding day. Elders continued to oversee the choice of spouses until a wave of modernization swept across the country in the early eighties. Women now had a voice in the selection of their mates, and, in one case, a bride who was marrying for love confided to Yan that she was too happy to sob; she had to rub hot pepper on her handkerchief in order to summon the tears that guests expected when a bride leaves home—the misery that would give face to her parents.
But nobody seemed to know how to make the most of that freedom. China had few bars or churches, and no co-ed softball, so pockets of society were left to improvise. Factory towns organized “friend-making clubs” for assembly-line workers; Beijing traffic radio, 103.9, set aside a half hour on Sundays for taxi-drivers to advertise themselves. But those practices merely reinforced existing barriers, and for vast numbers of people the collision of love, choice, and money was a bewildering new problem.
In much of the world, marriage is in decline; the proportion of married American adults is now fifty-one per cent, the lowest ever recorded. But in China, even as rates of divorce have climbed, so much of the culture revolves around family and offspring that ninety-eight per cent of the female population eventually marries—one of the highest levels in the world. (China has neither civil unions nor laws against discrimination, and it remains a very hard place to be gay.)
The proliferation of choice has been so radical that Gong has often been described in the local press as “China’s No. 1 matchmaker,” even though her business is a rebuke to the essence of matchmaking. Despite her company’s name, Gong projects nothing more plainly than a conviction that fate is obsolete. “Chinese people still put their faith in destiny,” she told the new employees. “They say, ‘Oh, I’ll get used to whatever happens.’ But you know what? They don’t need to do that anymore! Desire can lead them now. We’re giving people the freedom of love.”
After the orientation, Gong took the elevator back up to her office, on the tenth floor, and finished the day, as she often does, answering letters in her capacity as “Little Dragon Lady,” an advice columnist attuned to the specific problems of the People’s Republic. She flipped through messages from anguished bachelors, meddling parents, and anxious brides—many of them current or former members. She recently released a book, “Love Well, Don’t Get Hurt,” and her advice reads like an argument against China’s ancient pieties. If your mother-in-law sees you as “nothing but a baby-maker” and your husband won’t help, she told one new wife, forget the husband, “get some courage, and get out of that family.” In the case of a newly rich couple with the husband sleeping around, she applauded the wife for not becoming a “blubbering, feeble, pitiful creature,” and, instead, making him sign a contract that will cost him all his assets if he cheats again. Above all, Gong frames the search for love as a matter of fortitude. Heaven, she wrote, “will never throw you a meat pie.”
Growing up, Gong Haiyan never considered herself a catch. (“If anyone ever liked me, I have yet to hear about it.”) She spent her childhood at the foot of a mountain in the village of Waduangang, in Hunan, the home province of Chairman Mao. Her parents’ marriage was arranged by a middleman. During the Cultural Revolution, they were paired because they had been branded as “well-off peasants,” one of the Five Black Categories.
When Gong was sixteen, her test scores got her into the top local high school, a transformative moment for a farming family. A few days later, she was on a tractor that plunged into a ditch, and the accident crushed her right leg and battered her face. When she got out of the hospital, wearing a hip cast, she discovered that a rural school was no place for a student who was unable to walk. The school suggested that she withdraw. Instead, Gong’s mother moved into her dorm room and hoisted her daughter around campus on her back. I wondered if the story was a metaphor—until I met her mother, Jiang Xiaoyuan. “There was one especially tall building, the laboratory,” Jiang said. “Gong’s class was on the fourth floor.” Her mother was undeterred: “School was her only way out. We didn’t want her to work in the fields like us.”
The medical bills drove the family into debt, which tormented Gong. “My accident had made a mess of the family,” she said. It was 1994, and China’s epic labor migration was gathering. Gong dropped out of school and got a job in Zhuhai, assembling televisions. She wrote an article for the factory newspaper, and was promoted to editor, but she was unnerved by the path she saw ahead. Bosses preferred women for detail work, and the factory was populated almost entirely by women, except for the security guards and the loaders and cooks. “If I ever wanted to settle down, those were my choices,” Gong said. After two years in the factory, she decided to go back to high school.
“Everyone in the village was against the idea,” she told me. “They said, ‘You’re a twenty-one-year-old woman. Go and get married!’ ” But her parents backed her decision, and she eventually earned a coveted spot at Peking University. A few years later, while she was in her second year of graduate work at Fudan University, in Shanghai, she realized that her love life was a wreck: “I didn’t know a soul in the city. My parents had an elementary-school education. I could never be interested in the kinds of people they had access to. So, even though ‘free love and marriage’ had been written into the laws, we didn’t actually have the freedom to choose.”
Gong paid five hundred yuan (about sixty dollars at the time) to an early online dating service, and singled out twelve men. She got no response, and complained. She still recalls the company’s reply: “Look at yourself—you’re ugly, and you go after these high-quality men? No wonder you got no replies.” She tracked down one of the bachelors and learned that he hadn’t registered with the site. The photograph, the vitals, the contact info had all been cobbled together from other online sites. China had mastered the fake Polo shirt, and now it was turning to the counterfeit date. “I wasn’t thinking about being an entrepreneur—I was just so angry,” Gong said. “I wanted a site for people who were in the same position I was in.”
She mapped out a simple design on Front Page, the Web-site software. To sell ads, she hired her brother, Gong Haibing, a laid-back housepainter, who’d taken computer classes after dropping out of high school. He told me, laughing, “To be honest, I wasn’t doing much of anything, and I thought, Sure, I’d love to have a few computers.” (He now heads the Shanghai office of Jiayuan.) She signed up her friends, and other customers followed, but she had almost run out of money when a software developer named Yu Fuping invested the equivalent of fifteen thousand dollars; later, he met his wife on the site. Gong used it to expand the site, and discovered that there was a deep well of untapped demand. Even though computer scanners were hard to come by, and some customers had to send their photographs to her by post, people were signing up at a rate of nearly two thousand a day. By 2006, when I met Gong, the site had a million registered users; the following year, venture capitalists invested. In 2008, she began to charge for the first time—two yuan, about thirty cents—for sending or receiving a message, and by 2011 Jiayuan had fifty-six million registered users, and in China was ranked first in time spent online and in the number of unique visitors. Last May, Gong travelled to New York to watch the company go public.
Whether the site yields successful matches is difficult to assess. In America, some scholars remain skeptical that technology will ever approximate the intangibles of a traditional courtship. Jiayuan’s design puts less emphasis on the mysteries of an algorithm and more on a user’s own choices, which can result in unlikely successes. Tang Jing, a thirty-three-year-old accountant in Beijing, received a message on Jiayuan last spring from a man she had no obvious reason to consider. “He’s not great looking, he’s not tall, he’s not rich,” she said, laughing. His name was Gao Liang, and he was studying photography in Germany. He’d come upon Tang Jing’s profile by chance and was curious about her photo and the fact that she’d moved to Beijing, far from her parents; he was also impressed that she listed a salary that would scare most men away. “I found it interesting because I’m not rich and I’m not ashamed about it,” Gao said. The two have been together for fourteen months. “It doesn’t matter to me whether he has money or not,” Tang told me. “Most important, I really think he’s talented. He will shine one day.”
The greatest difference between Internet dating in America and in China is conceptual: in America, it has the power to expand your universe of potential mates; in China, a nation of 1.3 billion people, online dating promises to do the opposite. “I once watched a twenty-three-year-old woman search for dates in Beijing, where there are four hundred thousand male users,” Lu Tao, Jiayuan’s chief engineer, told me. “She narrowed it down by blood type and height and zodiac sign and everything else until, at last, she had a pool of eighty-three men.” (A Chinese banker explained to me that he uses Jiayuan to filter for a single criterion—height—which provides him with a bevy of fashion models.)
When I signed on to Jiayuan for this story, I answered thirty-five multiple-choice questions. After height, weight, income, and other vitals, I was asked to assess the shape of my face by the Chinese standards of beauty; there was an option for a face as oval as a “duck’s egg” and a face as narrow as a “sunflower seed.” For a moment, I wondered whether a “national character face” was the choice for patriots, but then I saw that it’s for those with a lantern jaw, like the squared-off Chinese character for “nation”: . I chose “triangular face.” The Communist Party spent decades promoting the virtues of conformity, but the questionnaire suggested that, in the new world of Chinese love, a man is expected to be able to define himself as precisely as possible. One question provided a list of “Jiayuan labels” from which to choose:
Members can also filter out people who look suspicious. In the years since Gong discovered the fake dates, the culture of counterfeiting in China has broadened. Jiayuan instituted a system that allows clients to verify their biographies by submitting copies of pay stubs, government I.D.s, divorce filings, and housing certificates. The more documents you send, the more stars you get beside your name. Jiayuan hired a team of document experts to hunt for forgeries and ferret out suspicious activity, such as a user who makes frequent adjustments to his name and birth date.
Shao Tong, a former Jiayuan employee, said, “You have to look at the details. Everybody has a tell, and you can’t hide your true self for too long.” Shao left Gong’s company in 2010 to open a school—the Beijing Moral Education Center for Women—which advertises with the slogan “Marry Once, Marry Right.” She gives classes on making the best use of Jiayuan and other sites, and her advice includes: Beware of a man posing beside a fancy car. (The richer he really is, the less likely he is to show it in his profile.) On a first date, make him do the travelling. (A man who suggests that you cross town on the first date is a man who will suggest that you split the bill.) Examine what she calls the “Four Big Accessories” (wristwatch, cell phone, belt, and shoes). When the bill comes, be wary if he keeps the receipt. (You should be more than a business expense.)
Shao told me that she teaches the importance of managing expectations. “It’s enough to find someone with ten times your income,” she said.
“Ten times?”
“Ten times is enough. No more than that. If your annual salary is twenty thousand yuan, then a spouse making one or two hundred thousand is enough. If you’re holding out for a millionaire, stop daydreaming.”
Charlatans have proved to be one of the greatest threats to Gong’s business. Last summer, Chinese state television reported that a man was sentenced by a Beijing court to two and a half years in jail for swindling a woman he allegedly met on the site. (Jiayuan denies involvement in the case.) After the report, Jiayuan stock lost nearly forty per cent of its value. More criticism followed. Last August, Jinghua Weekly, a state-backed newspaper, took aim at Jiayuan’s “V.I.P. High-Level Marriage Hunting Advisers,” a team of special matchmakers who deal only with the richest members, mostly men, lining them up with the most sought-after female users. The Diamond Bachelors, as these clients are called, spend up to fifty thousand dollars for six matches—an “outrageous” sum, the paper declared, making the program sound like a high-tech escort service. Gong, in response, cited the law of supply and demand. “Diamond Bachelors are looking for pretty young women,” she told me. “And some of these pretty women are looking to marry this kind of man. So it’s a perfect match.”
As a result of all the bad press, Jiayuan’s competitors thrived; there are now more than fifty Chinese dating sites, and they exploited Jiayuan’s troubles to pitch themselves as more conservative. The site that had built its reputation on the promise of “freedom of love” was being punished for losing control. Internet dating, which barely existed in China when Gong began, had become an industry worth more than a billion yuan, and the company needed a veteran. In March, with its revenue and its stock price slumping, Jiayuan hired a seasoned tech executive, Linguang Wu, to be co-C.E.O. On the day that Wu’s appointment to the love industry was announced, he had been running a popular online shooter game called World of Tanks.
Love stories didn’t become popular in China until the twentieth century, after European novels inspired a genre called “butterfly romance,” in which the lovers all “weep a great deal,” according to Haiyan Lee, at Stanford. In China, it seemed, love rarely ended well. While European protagonists occasionally found happiness, Chinese lovers succumbed to forces beyond their control: meddling parents, disease, a miscommunication. The love stories were categorized so that readers knew which doom to expect: Tragic Love, Bitter Love, Miserable Love, Wronged Love, and Chaste Love. A sixth genre, Joyous Love, was not as successful. (In the mid-nineties, the researchers Fred Rothbaum and Billy Yuk-Piu Tsang analyzed the lyrics of eighty Chinese and American pop songs, and found that Chinese songs conveyed more “negative expectations” and “suffering,” a sense that, if destiny did not help a relationship, “it cannot be salvaged.”)
Today, it seems that some people are making up for lost time. Lin Yu, a graduate student from Wuhan, itemized her expectations in an online ad:
Money and weddings have always been entwined more explicitly in China than in the West, but the finances were simpler when most people were broke. A bride’s parents paid a dowry, and the groom’s parents paid a larger sum, known as “bride wealth.” Under Mao, the exchange was made in grain, but in the eighties couples came to expect “three rounds and a sound”: a bicycle, a wristwatch, a sewing machine, and a radio. Or, in some cases, “thirty legs”: a bed, a table, and a set of chairs. (The custom persists in much of China, but in cash, most of which goes to the couple.)
The greatest shock to the marriage tradition came from an unlikely source: in 1997, the government gave people the right to buy and sell homes on the open market. China had never had an official term for “mortgage,” but real estate was suddenly an asset. Young Chinese couples used to move in with the groom’s parents, but today less than half of them stay very long, and the economists Shang-Jin Wei and Xiaobo Zhang discovered that parents with sons were building ever larger and more expensive houses for their offspring, in the hope of attracting better matches. Between 2003 and 2011, home prices in Beijing, Shanghai, and other big cities rose by as much as eight hundred per cent. According to a poll reported last year by Xinhua, the state news service, although only ten per cent of men on Jiayuan own a home, nearly seventy per cent of women said they wouldn’t marry a man without one. James Farrer, a sociologist at Sophia University, in Tokyo, who studies Chinese dating habits, calls this phenomenon “a bubble in the marriage market.” New Chinese terms have cropped up: a man without a house, a car, and a nest egg is a “triple without.” If he gets married, it’s a “naked wedding.” As these weddings become more common, they have acquired bohemian cachet, though the term conveys a certain recklessness. Last summer, “Naked Wedding” was the title of a TV miniseries about a privileged young bride who married her working-class husband over the objections of her parents, and moved in with his family. It became the most popular show in China. By the series’ end, the couple had divorced.
The one-child policy has heightened competition. When sonogram technology spread in China, in the nineteen-eighties, couples aborted female fetuses in order to wait for a boy. As a result, by 2020 China is expected to have twenty-four million men of marrying age who are unable to find a spouse—“bare branches” on the family tree, as they’re known in Chinese. Even so, the pressure to marry is hardly less intense for women, who are barraged with warnings in the Chinese press that they will be “leftover women” if they are still single at thirty. Women make up nearly half the population at Chinese universities today, a larger share than ever before, but Gong said that they often downplay their achievements to avoid intimidating their dates. “In China’s marriage market, there are three species trying to survive,” she said. “Men, women, and women with graduate degrees.”
In 2003, shortly after Gong Haiyan launched her site, a posting caught her eye: “Seeking a wife, 1.62 metres tall, above-average looks, graduate degree.” The seeker was a postdoc studying fruit flies. He liked to work out, and he posted a jokey photograph that showed him flexing his triceps in front of a lab bench. “He had the whole package,” Gong said. Then she looked at his requirements, and discovered that “I didn’t meet a single one.” She decided to answer his posting anyway. “Your announcement is not well written,” she replied. “Even if someone meets all those requirements, she’ll think you’re picky.” The man’s name was Guo Jianzeng, and he was embarrassed. “I’ve never written anything like this, and I don’t quite know what I’m doing,” he told her. Gong volunteered to polish his announcement. “After polishing, I could think of exactly four girls in the world who met those criteria, including me,” she said.
He was thirty-three and shy. When they met, his phone had only eight numbers stored in it. Gong had taken an online I.Q. test, and she asked Guo to take it, too. He beat her score by five points. She was also moved by the way he cared for his widowed father. Guo’s first gift to her was a replacement for a pair of broken glasses. On their second date, he proposed. She rode sidesaddle on the back of his bicycle to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, where they paid nine yuan for a marriage certificate. The ceremony took ten minutes. Instead of a wedding ring, he bought her a laptop.
“He’d rather buy me a watermelon than a flower,” she told me as we sat in a taxi idling in traffic. It was Valentine’s Day, one of China’s busiest shopping days. But not in the Gong household. “He thinks it’s not for married people, just for young lovers.”
For someone in the love business, Gong has a fitful relationship with romance. She speaks proudly about her bare-bones courtship but yearns, now and then, for some fuss of her own. (“Ten years, and I’ve yet to see a single petal.”) She finds China’s fusion of marriage and materialism disillusioning, but she prefers to focus on the fact that she’s equipping people to make a choice.
The sun was setting as we pulled off the highway into the suburb where she lives. The love business has made her rich; when the company went public, her shares were worth more than seventy-seven million dollars. We passed a Pet Spa and a compound called Château de la Vie, and turned into a lush gated community that evoked New Jersey more than Hunan. Her house was beige stucco, and her daughter, who is two, met her at the front door in pajamas; Gong’s husband ushered us to the dining-room table, where her parents and her grandmother, who live with them, were seated. I was struck by the presence of four generations of women in the house. Gong’s grandmother, who is ninety-four, was born not long after China put an end to foot binding.
For years, the family bounced between rented apartments, six people in two bedrooms, until Gong bought the house. They had yet to adapt to wealth. Nine months after they moved in, the walls were still bare and an electric moped filled the front hall. It felt as if the family had packed up its belongings from a farmhouse in Hunan and unloaded them at a C.E.O.’s villa in Beijing.
After the company went public, Gong’s husband left his job to take care of the household. Gong’s business is animated by an image of love and fulfillment that privileges beauty and income above all, and promotes the fear of becoming a leftover woman. But Gong believes that her mission is simply to give women like her the options that never existed before. “Women used to say, ‘If you want clothes on your back and food to eat, get married,’ ” she said, as we ate dinner. “As long as you had the most basic requirements, I’d marry you. But not anymore. Now I can live a good life, an independent life. I can be picky. If there’s anything I don’t like about you, well, you’re out of luck.”
Once or twice a week, Gong’s company holds singles mixers, and on a weekday in early January I filed into a ballroom in Beijing with three hundred immaculately groomed men and women. They had been issued battery-powered blinking lights, in the shape of puckered lips, to be pinned to their clothing. An m.c. bounded onstage and summoned the crowd’s attention. “Please put your hand over your heart and repeat after me: ‘I swear that I am here today to find my other half with a true and honest heart,’ ” he said, and paused for emphasis. “ ‘I swear that I do not come here with any deceptive or ill intent.’ ”
Twelve women assembled onstage in a game-show setup, each holding a red wand with a heart-shaped light on top: on, interested; off, not interested. It was an accomplished lineup of engineers, graduate students, and bank employees, in their late twenties and early thirties. One by one, men took the stage to be questioned and to find a mate, but in the exchanges I frequently sensed a gulf of expectation. A barrel-chested bank employee in a cotton sweater attracted considerable interest until he said that he would be stuck in the office six and a half days a week. Next up was a physics professor in tweeds, who described his life’s ambition as “no marvellous accomplishment, just nothing I’ll regret.” A match did not present herself. Last came a terse criminal lawyer with a fondness for hiking, who was doing well until he informed the panelists that he would place a heavy emphasis on “obedience.” Lights blinked off. He left the stage alone.
The New Year holiday, days away, loomed like a deadline. Wang Jingbing, a thirty-year-old with a friendly national-character face, was bracing for the encounter with his family. “They will give me pressure—that’s the reason I came here tonight,” he said, as we sat along the wall. After college, Wang became a paper salesman, exporting napkins. The work had left an imprint on his English vocabulary; when he described a bad date, he would say he’d been “returned”: “To tell you the truth, yesterday I was returned by a girl because she said I’m not as tall as she hoped.” The singles events baffled his relatives in the countryside. “My sister doesn’t agree with my coming here,” he told me. “She said, ‘You’ll never find a girl here.’ ” What does he think? “I have to follow my heart. My sister had a different educational background and life experience, so we have different ideas.” His sister, who never studied beyond junior high school, still lives in their home village, where she sells soda wholesale and dried noodles out of a storefront. When she was twenty, she married a man she’d been introduced to by relatives; he was from a neighboring village. Wang, who is her younger brother, studied English at Shandong University and migrated to Beijing for work. By the time we met, he had been in the capital for five years, and he was on the verge of moving up from the working class. He couldn’t yet afford an iPhone, but he could afford a copy of the Steve Jobs biography, which he quoted like Scripture.
Wang had assigned himself a mission: he would attend at least one mixer a weekend until he found someone. I asked him if he agreed with the expectation that he should have a house and a car before he marries. “Yes, because a house and a car are the signs of civility,” he said. “A woman marrying a man is partly marrying his house and his car. I’m a renter, so I feel a lot of pressure.” He was quiet for a moment, and said, “But I have potential, you know? In my opinion, to buy a house and a car will take me about five more years. Five more years.”
A few months passed before I saw Wang again. Then we met for coffee on a Sunday, and he was with his friend Zeng Qingfei, a fish salesman. Zeng was new to the capital and hyper-alert; crossing the street, he darted like a minnow. Wang was showing him around the singles circuit. When I asked Wang how it had gone with his parents over New Year, he replied, “I couldn’t do it.” In ten years, he had never missed a homecoming, but this time he phoned his parents with a lie about pressing work. “I was too ashamed that I still didn’t have a girlfriend to bring home,” he said.
But now Wang had some fragile news to share. He had recently met someone. He held up four fingers. “Four dates already,” he said. Her name was Meng Xing, she was an accountant, and nobody was returning anyone yet. After three years and more than a hundred Jiayuan mixers, he had encountered her at just such an event and hustled after her to the subway. They lived, it turned out, only a few blocks from each other. In a city of twenty million people, that felt like fate. ♦
