[For most of Chinese history, finding Cai a wife would have been a family project. Although Mao banned arranged marriages in 1950, they endured alongside work unit matchmakers until the 1980s, when the economy and the marriage market started to open up.]
By Emily Rauhala
 |
|
Cai
Jun (left) and Cao Bin play with their mobile phones during a matchmaking
event in
Hangzhou, China. (Emily Rauhala/The Washington Post)
|
HANGZHOU,
China — Cai Jun was that guy
at the government-sponsored dating event.
He arrived early in a suit and shiny shoes, looking
like a Chinese version of Manny from “Modern Family.” He took a seat in the
front row. Adjusted his glasses. Kept his eyes on his phone.
Four hours into “Hangzhou Love,” as the crowd
thinned and the sound crew started packing up, Cai had barely talked to a girl,
let alone gotten a number. So, he did what nobody expected that guy to do: He
stormed the stage to sing a love song.
“An island can trap a man,” he crooned.
“The boat I’m waiting for hasn’t come.”
The Communist Youth League wants to be that
boat. Or to bring him a boat, ideally with a wife in it. What they don’t want
is for Cai, or tens of millions of other young people, to stay single.
For most of Chinese history, finding Cai a wife
would have been a family project. Although Mao banned arranged marriages in
1950, they endured alongside work unit matchmakers until the 1980s, when the
economy and the marriage market started to open up.
Forty years into China’s economic
transformation, dating is a free-for-all of pickups, hookups and setups that
give young people looking to marry more choice than ever before. (This does not
apply to everyone: Same-sex marriage is banned in China.)
But China’s leaders are not fans of
free-for-all markets. Last year, they decided there was some correction to do.
Thanks to the one-child policy and a
preference for sons, China has a surplus of men. The number of unmarried men
between ages 35 and 59 will reach 15 million in 2020, according to one Chinese
estimate.
Concerned that the gender imbalance could
create instability, the ruling party first tried to shame single women into
marriage, calling them “leftover” and comparing them to yellowed pearls.
Now it has settled on a more robust market
intervention: mass matchmaking.
In Zhejiang, a prosperous province in
southern China, an estimated 100,000 young people attended Communist Youth
League dating events last year, the group says.
And so it was that on a Sunday afternoon, a
couple hundred singles gathered on an artificial beach set in the hills outside
Hangzhou, and Cai seized the moment — and the mic.
“You can’t find a girlfriend sitting at
home,” he said.
The man in charge of getting Hangzhou singles
out of the house is Wang Huiqiu, a 35-year-old cadre from the Zhejiang
Communist Youth League’s propaganda department.
Last spring, the league’s top brass announced
that the organization would henceforth fight “the marriage problem” by helping
young people develop the “correct attitude” toward finding a spouse.
Ever since, Wang, who is married, has spent
his weeks setting up dating events and his weekends supervising them, a mission
he pursues with a sort of nouveau Marxist zeal.
Wang sees matchmaking as a natural fit for a
mass organization. Sure, private dating apps are popular, but few have the
reach of the Communist Youth League, which has tens of millions of members, he
argued.
He urged young people to be skeptical of
private apps where scammers abound and prices are high. “A fully commercialized
market can be problematic,” he said.
Although Wang would never say it, the
once-powerful Youth League has been sidelined under President Xi Jinping. Mass
matchmaking seems to be a bid to stay relevant — while serving the party, of
course.
Wang framed it in economic terms: “The demand
for love and marriage is inelastic.”
“Of course,” he added, “if you meet your
partner through the Communist Youth League, you will naturally feel closer to
us.”
To nurture that closeness, the Zhejiang
branch built “a public-interest dating platform,” Qin Qing Lian, that is part
“swipe right,” part “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
After signing up and getting vetted by the
local public security bureau, users can browse thousands of profiles.
They can also read dating advice, or “lessons
on romantic relations,” courtesy of the Communist Youth League. The lesson —
singular — is that you should get married as soon as humanly possible.
Men are advised to become providers, women to
find a provider, fast. “As long as he’s willing to spend money on the woman he
loves, he’s the right one to marry,” one tip says.
Although it is young men who are at high risk
of staying permanently single, the focus is on changing women, not men.
On his way to the opening of “Hangzhou Love,”
Wang worked his phone while mulling ways to get female comrades to marry before
they get, as he put it, “picky.”
Women are looking for the “three highs: high
education, high salary and height,” he said, but that’s not easy to find.
“As women grow older and their social
position rises, they will want better men,” he said. “If the Communist Youth
League helps women from an earlier stage, it will be easier for them. As early
as possible, ideally 25.”
When Wang arrived at the venue, the crowd was
seated at long tables facing a huge stage. Attendees checked messages and took
selfies while Katy Perry, who was recently prevented from entering China,
blasted from the speakers.
Seated in the front row alongside Cai were a
25-year old man, Cao Bin, and a 29-year-old woman, Zha Wei.
Cao came to the event because it was
co-sponsored by his favorite radio station; he didn’t seem concerned about
finding a wife.
A recent basketball injury got him thinking
that it would be nice to have a girlfriend, though. “I want somebody to take
care of me,” he said.
He spent the day trying out lines: “Why won’t
you look me in the eyes?” he asked one young woman. “Is it because I’m too
handsome?”
When she ignored him, he asked, “What, am I
too outgoing?”
One seat over, Zha was taking things more
seriously.
Zha didn’t have much confidence in the Youth
League — “Are they professional matchmakers? No, they’re not,” she said — but
she came to maximize her man-meeting options.
At 29, she sees herself as having an “age
problem” and feels intense pressure to find a husband and have children. “I
want my family to see that I’m trying to participate in events like this and
reach out to people, so that they know I’m really trying,” she said.
The problem is that the things she’s proud
of, including her master’s degree in economics and her experience abroad, seem
to hurt, not help, her at events like this. “Men all want ‘girly’ girls,” she
said.
Cai, the crooner, did not dispute that women
are under more pressure. “Men don’t age as quickly as women,” he said, as if it
were a scientific fact.
He likes that Youth League events draw
white-collar workers, but said career success is not the first thing he looks
for in a woman. For him, it is “tenderness” that counts.
In the end, “Hangzhou Love” was a lot like
mass dating events elsewhere — that is, awkward.
Cao Bin’s lines fell flat. Zha Wei didn’t get
a date. And for Cai’s act of courage — unprompted karaoke — he was not rewarded
with a number, let alone true love.
But despite the odds of singledom, he was
optimistic. Asked about his prospects, he waxed poetic about intertwined
hearts, then launched into an actual Tang Dynasty love poem:
I don’t have wings to fly with you,
Our hearts as one, you hear my inner call.
He is still single.
Shirley Feng contributed to this report.
Read more