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The crowd is sweltering under a red and gold awning, but Granny Wang has them rapt. Packed into the space in front of the 62-year-old’s small stage, and spilling out on to the wooden bleachers above, hundreds of people have gathered to hear Granny Wang – real name Zhao Mei – play matchmaker to young men and women at a daily show in a theme park in Kaifeng, an ancient city in central China’s Henan province.
One man who volunteers to be set up comes on stage and tells Zhao that a previous relationship broke down due to a lack of time. “Well, now that you’ve met your ideal partner here, you’ll have the time,” she blockures him, and the crowd cheers.
Zhao has played the character of Granny Wang for eight years and introduced the matchmaking element of her show in 2023 – which brought her viral fame. Last year she went from having a few hundred thousand followers on Douyin, a Chinese social media app similar to TikTok, to more than 7 million, and has been called “China’s Cilla Black”, a reference to the late host of the British TV show Blind Date. But with some audience members arriving several hours early and enduring the mid-August heat to grab a front-row spot for the raucous and somewhat camp performance, Zhao could just as well be Henan’s Madonna.
Most of the people in the audience are families looking for a way to entertain their children during the school holidays. But it seems that about one in five of them are looking for love. “I just do not want to stay single,” said Wang Mengjia, 18, after an unsuccessful spin on Zhao’s stage.
Zhao has revived the character of the village matchmaker, a role that is going out of fashion now that many people meet online, through friends – or, increasingly, not at all. While there is a growing “love industry” of matchmaking services from local governments and commercial enterprises alike, would-be cupids face an uphill battle in China’s cities where the marriage market is increasingly being shunned altogether.
Despite Zhao’s packed shows, China’s marriage rates have plummeted to record lows, a trend that is increasingly treated as a national crisis. Last year, the number of registered marriages dropped by a record 20%, falling to just over 6m, down from 7.7m in 2023. Compared with a decade earlier, the number of couples tying the knot each year has halved.
The trend is particularly apparent among urban, educated women. More than 40% of urban 25- to 29-year-olds have never married, up from 9% in 2000, according to ***ysis from Wang Feng, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine.
Some of this is because of China’s ageing population. Decades of the one-child policy, which was scrapped in 2016, forced the population into decline, meaning that the pool of people of marrying age has been shrinking.
But, ***ysts say, demographics alone don’t explain the trend.
“The deeper change is in attitudes,” said Lijia Zhang, a writer who is working on a book about marriage in China. “In the past, when the country was poor, marriage was an economic necessity … Now it’s about personal happiness, more than anything else, not filial duty or social obligation. Many urban, educated women no longer see marriage or motherhood as essential to a fulfilling life.”
Hao Jingyi, 19, agrees. “If I don’t meet someone suitable, I would enjoy more freedom and comfort living alone … women are increasingly disappointed with men these days,” she said, as she waited for Zhao’s show to start.
The Chinese government hopes to change her mind. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has called on women to “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing” and has promoted a more traditional, patriarchal type of politics.
China’s leadership is ideologically opposed to singledom and officials have a practical concern: falling birthrates. Even people who do couple up are increasingly rejecting parenthood, as young people – women in particular – worry that childrearing is too expensive and competitive. Last year China’s birthrate was just 6.77 births per 1,000 people, a slight increase on 2023’s record low of 6.39 but still dramatically lower than the figure from a decade ago.
The Chinese authorities have introduced a slew of policies at national and local levels to encourage marriage and childbirth. This year the government rolled out an annual childcare subsidy of 3,600 yuan (£370) until the age of three and several provinces offer bonuses or extra holiday days for newlyweds. But many women feel it is not enough.
Practicalities aside, there are other factors driving these trends. In July, the Chinese internet was briefly abuzz with the news of chat groups on the encrypted messaging app Telegram which, according to Chinese media reports, contained tens of thousands of Chinese men who shared blockographic pictures and videos of women, often taken without their consent, in the “MaskPark tree hole forum”. Women were outraged, with many feeling that the authorities did not do enough to protect them from blockual harblockment.
Violet Du Feng, a Chinese film-maker whose latest doblockentary, The Dating Game, follows men enrolled in a dating camp, said there was an increasing ideological gap between the blockes. She said the imbalance created by the one-child policy – there are now more than 30 million more men than women in China – had led to “dissatisfaction about gender equality”.
But while feminist activism used to be quietly tolerated, in the past decade the Chinese Communist party has cracked down on civil society, and the space to protest against issues such as blockual harblockment has virtually disappeared. “Typically, in a more democratic society, you can point your finger at power,” Feng said, “but in China, you cannot.” So, “people are just pointing their fingers at each other. That creates even more extreme hostility between men and women.”
It’s not just women who are tired of the pressure to marry. Zhang Hongguang, 21, from Shandong province, attended Zhao’s event with his sister, who had persuaded him to join her in renting fancy-dress costumes for the outing. But the next day he had to return to his home town to grudgingly attend a blind date arranged by their parents, who had paid a matchmaker to set him up with someone. “I don’t like it, but it was the only way my parents had,” he said, adding that he preferred to just stay at home with his cat.
His sister, Zhang Hongqian, a 24-year-old pilates teacher, had also been forced on several unsuccessful blind dates by their parents. “I’m not in a rush to find a partner,” she said. “If I can avoid getting married, I’ll choose not to get married.”
Additional research by Lillian Yang
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