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The city of Guixi, in the Chinese province of Jiangxi, has recently released a new app created specifically to try to solve an issue that local politicians find worrying: there are not enough couples getting married. In recent years, the number of marriages in China has dropped dramatically: 11.58 million people were married in 2021 (excluding those who were not in their first marriage), the lowest number since 1985. For the Chinese Communist Party this is a problem both in terms of social stability and in terms of birth rates, which have been declining for years.
In Jiangxi, located in southern China, various solutions have been sought: some municipalities have organized public events, inviting all singles in the area to participate in order to get to know each other, or they have promoted other types of campaigns to bring together people interested in start a relationship. The city of Guixi, with around 650,000 inhabitants, has instead decided to create a small local dating app, inviting all single people in the area to join. It’s called Palm Guixi, and it will work a little differently than apps like Tinder or Bumble, where users voluntarily choose which profiles they’re interested in and which aren’t.
According to Sixth Tone, a Chinese newspaper that deals with technology, its functioning is currently still nebulous: we only know that the app itself will report the couples that could work better based on the information that the local administration has on their own single citizens. The app is then supposed to help set up “blind dates” between people it believes have enough in common. It is unclear whether participation will be voluntary, or whether all single people will sign up for the service without giving their consent.
The Jiangxi administration is not the only one to keep a detailed database of its single citizens: already in 2021 the municipality of Luanzhou, in Hebei province, had announced that the government was mapping all single people in the city – collecting information such as gender, profession, financial situation and family background – and then ask them to register for government-organised matchmaking activities.
In the case of Jiangxi, the local government has explicitly said that these initiatives serve to “reform local marriage traditions”, introducing new ones. Jiangxi is in fact one of the Chinese provinces where the practice of dowry is still very popular: the family of the future groom must offer a lot of money and gifts to the family of the future bride before the engagement is accepted. “Provinces like Jiangxi blame the gender imbalance – there were 1.5 million more men than women in 2021 – and large dowries for the low number of marriages, and many people are calling for more regulations to limit this tradition», explains Sixth Tone.
However, a recent survey by the South China Morning Post indicates that the reasons why young people marry less are more complex, and in some cases difficult to reform. On the one hand there is the fact that in recent years the government has made it much more complicated to divorce: according to a law dated January 2021, those requesting a divorce must wait 30 days for the procedure to be started, in the hope they will reconsider, and even longer if the partner refuses to divorce. “Many people’s requests for divorce have not been approved even when they have evidence of cheating and domestic violence. Getting married is like going to hell,” an interviewee told the Chinese newspaper.
Then there is the growing job insecurity of young Chinese, who choose to delay marriage because they cannot afford the related and consequent expenses, such as buying a house and having children. And there are those who prefer to simply enjoy the single life for a few more years. “Marriage is like a bet. The problem is that ordinary people can’t afford to lose, so I choose not to participate,” said another respondent.
Guixi’s dating app has garnered a lot of flak on Weibo, China’s main social network. Some have written that the government’s intention is only to increase the birth rate, which is also declining in China. Others have questioned whether it is legitimate for the authorities to collect and share the personal information of single people to try to match them, especially without their consent.
“A government-sponsored dating platform is more reliable than commercial ones, where you have to pay for the service yourself. But we also need to make sure our private information is safe,” one user wrote.
