What many Chinese people may not know is that the Shanghai Marriage Market is internationally famous, and it’s a spot many foreign travelers to Shanghai make a point of visiting. It has a detailed English Wikipedia entry, yet not even a Chinese one. Several English-language travel sites have written how-to guides for visiting it. There are also numerous videos about it on YouTube. —By contrast, Chinese tourists rarely think of paying it a special visit.
If you want to go, you should arrive on a weekend between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. As long as you enter at the right time through Gate 5 of People’s Park (near People’s Square metro station), what greets your eyes is the notorious Shanghai Marriage Market. Come at any other time and it’s just an ordinary, peaceful city park where lots of elderly folks stroll—one whose look-alikes can be found in many Chinese cities. The difference is simply that this one sits right by the famous Nanjing Road in Shanghai.
Countless ads printed on plain paper are densely arrayed along both sides of the path. Their format is much like what you see on online matchmaking apps: the first half is basic personal information, and the second half lists preferences or requirements for a partner. Most are printed; a small portion are handwritten. Because the paper is small, each ad can only contain very limited information, so visitors can scan all of them fairly quickly and draw some general, preliminary conclusions.
Some foreigners come because they’ve heard of it, and they stand and look even if they probably can’t read Chinese. I saw one conscientious foreign tourist who had hired a private guide; she asked careful questions, and the guide worked hard to explain what was happening here. The Shanghai Marriage Market is a particularly suitable object for anthropological research.
The subjects of these ads range from people born in the 2000s to those born in the 1950s, though the overwhelming majority are from the 1990s and 1980s. In terms of education, salary, and job prestige, every situation exists—even if people are more likely to remember the ones who are 985 or overseas graduates, earn several hundred thousand yuan a year, or work as corporate executives or university instructors, rather than those with vocational diplomas, unspecified incomes, or jobs like nurse or security guard. Not everyone has a Shanghai hukou, nor is everyone’s ID number one that begins with 310. Incredibly, some even write that they are “Party members.” Although most ads don’t state a regional requirement, since this is the Shanghai Marriage Market, it’s presumably assumed the other party is at least currently living in Shanghai.
Titles aren’t necessary, but one amusing title I saw was “Pretty Girl,” set in bold, oversized type. A dazed tourist seeing it might think they’d just picked up a sex-service flyer from the ground. Another ad was titled “Marriage Certificate Not Processed,” and in that limited space much of the text was devoted to explaining that, due to “problems on the man’s side,” the relationship ended three days after getting the certificate—yet the problem is that this leaves visitors with the impression of nothing more than a “woman who hasn’t processed the certificate.”
One ad was handwritten in barely legible script. The only self-introduction was “Male, born 1975, Shanghainese,” and the requirements were equally simple: “woman with a university degree and a job,” or “unmarried woman under 25.” Clearly this 50-year-old middle-aged man seems to believe that the power of his exalted Shanghai hukou is equivalent to U.S. citizenship. Maybe he’s extraordinarily rich? That said, there really are people currently living in Canada and claiming to hold a green card who post ads here.
But if you hope to see anything truly interesting here, you may well be disappointed, because this place does not welcome people who come to subvert it through irony; those who come are serious about finding a partner.
Many ads are unattended, or temporarily unattended. Others have someone watching over them, but most of those watchers are mask-wearing middle-aged brokers—“aunties” or “uncles”—rather than the subject’s parents, let alone the subjects themselves. It appears that for the younger ones, either the parents themselves or agents hired by the parents place the ads, whereas older subjects tend to hire agents on their own. Some broker-aunties will stop tourists from taking photos, saying it’s “people’s privacy,” but such a demand is supported neither by law nor by common sense: information that is publicly and explicitly displayed in a city square cannot, at the same time, claim privacy—that’s logically incoherent. Moreover, although matchmaking ads may look like private matters, in fact they cannot be matched to any specific individual, so they can be regarded as data irrelevant to any identifiable person. The only thing that might constitute privacy is the phone number, yet that is often the agent’s or the parents’. And some subjects have clearly purchased multiple agency services, because I saw the same person’s ad at different stalls.
As I wandered, I also overheard broker-aunties chatting with people who seemed interested. The aunties do possess professional ability and basic ethics; when promoting the person they’re responsible for, they are warm and earnest, repeatedly suggesting that people “add WeChat first” to take a look, or telling them to come back after lunch. I found these sales routines quite entertaining, because scenes like this that I’d previously encountered were usually about pitching some material product—rather than a person as a product. Of course, I didn’t strike up a conversation with these aunties, because they clearly had no time to chat with an idler like me.
I was reminded of my middle-school days, when on weekend nights I would often whisper with a roommate, secretly appraising girls in our class or girls in other classes we both knew (after I entered high school I never did this again, because my moral sense had risen to the point where even whispering about such topics was off-limits). I imagine that if you have a close friend, coming together as “miscellaneous bystanders” to visit the Shanghai Marriage Market—browsing the ads while whispering comments about them—would be quite fun, just like a few boys in middle school standing at the window together and commenting on girls walking in the distance.
Would this be a problem? I don’t think so. Since the matchmaking market has already commodified people, why shouldn’t we have the right to review the commodities? (In fact, these ads are essentially data that cannot be matched to any concrete individual.) If we don’t even have the freedom to review commodities, is this still a normal market? (It’s like how negative reviews of certain brands now get deleted and accounts banned.) We are, in essence, commenting on commodities, not on persons. If we were commenting on the person, that would of course be taboo. And I think friends joking and critiquing these ads together is better than another outcome: leaving the visit fired up to raise one’s “market value” in the matchmaking bazaar and sprint with all one’s might toward vulgarity.
All right—back to the point. In You Should Stop Matchmaking and Start Dating I already made clear my basic attitude toward matchmaking, and I compared the Shanghai Marriage Market to China’s Sodom and Gomorrah. There’s no need here to trot out the relevant principles and empirical research again. I will confine myself to pointing out the problems with the practice of public matchmaking advertising—represented by the Shanghai Marriage Market—occurring in public spaces across Chinese cities. In my view, the efficiency of public matchmaking markets must be extremely low.
In The Deceptiveness of Matchmaking I have already discussed the factors Chinese parents consider when picking partners for their children: the other party’s parents’ occupations, pensions, real-estate holdings, as well as the other party’s job and education. These external factors are not important to how an intimate relationship actually functions. Furthermore, while external factors may constitute the main component of male attractiveness, they are not the main component of female attractiveness. The public matchmaking market, like parent-mediated matchmaking, shares this flaw of failing to grasp the essence of the matter.
In public matchmaking markets, what people focus on are still the so-called “conditions,” while almost completely ignoring inner qualities of character. When an agent says someone has “good conditions,” they invariably mean that the person’s parents have pensions, they work in a state-owned enterprise or a foreign company, their annual salary is such-and-such, and their educational credential is such-and-such. Looks are seldom discussed, and personality at most gets praised in extremely abstract terms—let alone any other inner qualities. Thus the situation you encounter in the public matchmaking market is that you become interested in someone only because you are interested in their “conditions”—the attributes of a commodity—rather than in the person themselves. But the problem is: you are marrying a person, not purchasing a commodity. You only learn what they look like after adding the agent on WeChat, and you can only learn about their inner qualities after meeting—by which time it is often too late. Therefore the public matchmaking market faces the same problem as dating apps: you add a great many contacts, yet can hardly move any of them forward. And since a dating app is, after all, just an app, the cost of ending up in this situation is lower.
On dating apps you can at least see the other person’s appearance—even if it may be beautified to varying degrees—but in public matchmaking markets it’s impossible to see photos. That truly is unbelievable! Because for both men and women, looks are, logically, the very first factor considered (men in particular consider women’s looks), yet in the public matchmaking market you can’t see them at all. From this perspective, seeking a partner here is no different from the blind men and the elephant.
There’s another issue here: some ads and contacts are handled by parents. To let your parents take care of what may be the most important matter of your life, rather than taking full control yourself, is absolutely irresponsible toward your own life. And even if parents are very enthusiastic about it, if the child only cooperates reluctantly, the efficiency of the public matchmaking market will be even lower—because the principal has merely sent a proxy into the market.
Most importantly, once you enter the public matchmaking market, unless a miracle occurs, you are basically saying farewell to the possibility of romantic love. Because marriage is happier and more meaningful when founded on romantic love, entering the public matchmaking market not only costs money and is inefficient; it also deprives you of one of life’s vital experiences.
In recent years, the likes of Eva Illouz and Chizuko Ueno have kept repeating in our ears clichés about the “end of love” in capitalist societies or the “ideology of romantic love.” I suggest that these left-wing sociologists pay a visit to the internationally famous attraction that is the Shanghai Marriage Market, then go back and think again about what leads to the end of love and what the end of love looks like—and consider which commodifies people more: certain traditional cultures, or capitalism.
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