Great article, exaggerated, at least according to my Chinese friends, it’s not that bad. They would say that, of course.
From a western perspective, the one child policy seems to have done the same thing feminism did here, turned marriage into a brutally elitist market, but with the opposite mechanism.
Here, the tool was liberation, individualism, the belief that we could afford to create a world where people could pursue what made them happy, not the practical, rational match they had been pressured into.
There, it’s family, tradition, the need to have a family for intergenerational care, not the romantic match they really wanted.
The result for both was a broken market for family. The delusions are insane: the west won’t admit that not having a family and dying alone are actually bad for the vast majority of people, and the east won’t admit that the emergent hierarchy makes love a miserable joke, not to mention what their deep avoidance of the underclass says about their “communism”. These societies are both dying, in their own way. The prognosis is terminal in their current forms.
The hardest thing to admit will be that the elitism is natural in people, that it wasn’t a socially constructed mistake traceable to capitalism or a straightforward moral failure. This is who we actually are, and the success enabled us to act on it. Mary only who you really want… and it’s always the rich, pretty one.
No one wants to tell people that they have to marry ugly or poor for the sake of social continuity, let alone tell them they have to marry ugly or poor because thats all they rate. They have to figure it out on their own. This is decadence. It has killed great societies before and will do it again.
Very sharp commentary. I agree with almost all of it. I’d only add that concepts like face, shame, and filial obligation matter here in ways that can’t be reduced to economics or to the structural features of the modern Chinese state. You see similar patterns, to varying degrees, across Han Chinese communities outside mainland China as well, which suggests something deeper than material conditions alone
Coming from the west, I respect that, though. We were all told to do what makes us happy, and what made us happy was doing whatever we want, putting off family until it was too late, not really putting in full effort to be successful or attractive.
There is still the hierarchy question: most of us could have worked hard and still had no prospects because success is relative. But we didn’t face the problem of delayed marriage at all. Parents trying to get their children to marry is pathetic and taboo here. Western media wants it to all be the fault of government or business or something, but it’s not. It’s just people. There’s not *enough* pressure, and no one would obey if there were more.
Face and filial piety are meant to guard against that, and I don’t think China would be in a better position if they didn’t exist, the men in particular might be even more lost.
This is not "beautifully written", this is gratingly AI written, to the point where I couldn't make it more than a quarter of the way (which is too bad because unlike most AI slop on Substack, this one seems actually to have some research and real world value).
It's also interesting that you don't deny the accusation this piece was AI written. I Ran it by GPT-zero and Pangram labs, and they found, respectively, 66% and 100% chance of AI. I'm honestly quite impressed. I enjoyed the piece, and the constructions that gave me a niggle of AI I dismissed, perhaps because I read my sensations of enjoyment and interest as "quality" and equated "human written". This is the first AI written piece I actually retain positive feelings for after learning I'd been gulled. Nonetheless, while I understand your incentive to conceal its AI origin, I do think it's enough of a dark mark on your character that you failed to disclose your writing process that I wish you no success from your quality work.
No, it's not. Nice try, though. (We were upfront about it in a way that you are not, there was a good reason to do it because it provided something in addition to rather than instead of the text transcript I had agreed to because I like my privacy, and it was Dwarkesh's idea in the first place - I was entirely uninvolved after I signed off on the text of the transcript. And the voice was a human.)
You did some good editing for sure, but then a few sections are almost word-for-word repeated in a way that's totally unnecessary for flow. The "He read it and said 'she's right, though" and the bit about the note needing to fit into the umbrella (a few sentences on either side of each) immediately come to mind.
As this is the first post I've seen on this blog, my first assumption was that this had been possibly written by a human but translated by AI.
Well, that's exactly the most offensive stylistic property of AI writing, isn't it? The fact that, like candy, it's tasty in a small dose - but then that's all you get, candy after candy, in an endless monotonic back and forth of quips and witticisms in the same register and shape, forever.
I didn't catch this, and I think it says something about my limitations as a reader and writer that I didn't. I dismissed my questions of AI construction and enjoyed the piece throughout.
No, it was not passed, because of the provenance? Please see my previous 1-sentence comment, in which I stated that I did not receive the message because of the provenance.
I thought the message of the article was clear - I understood it as an exploration of the theme that modern relationships are transactional from a uniquely Chinese cultural perspective.
---
In any case, I enjoyed the article and whether or not it was AI-generated does not diminish my appreciation of it, in any way.
Your writing style is very entertaining. This is a problem that every country is facing, it's just especially acute in China. It's human nature. Men want hot chicks and women want comfort and security. It was probably worse in tribal times and polygamous cultures before civilization forced monogamy on everyone.
Nitpicking a couple errors In your fictionalized story:
- There aren't 1.1 million men named Wang Wei. The figure is closer to a few hundred thousand.
- Wang Wei's parents wouldn't be at the Shanghai marriage market, because they're in Henan.
- A factory worker's profile would never be presented at the Shanghai marriage market, because the profile isn't competitive and it would be embarrassing for the parent. The marriage market is filled with profiles with impressive stats, but everyone is, like, old.
Thanks, valid criticism, taking some liberties for continuity and dramatic effect. My understanding is that the wang surname is around 100m people, so it wouldn’t be impossible that 1% have that first name also, but it is an approximation.
I agree that it is a human problem and not china specific problem. But I would add that it manifests in the same way as socialism with Chinese characteristics manifests….with distinctly Chinese characteristics.
Chinese given names are very diverse, in contrast to Chinese surnames which are very concentrated. It's directly opposite to Western names, where there is diversity in surnames but 3% of men are named John.
Interestingly, Xinhua has a news article about the name Wang Wei.
There were 287,101 people named Wang Wei in 2019, but this is for the most common written form 王伟, with 伟 meaning 'greatness'. This stat is for both sexes, and 王伟 is a reasonable female name too. I don't have stats on other less common characters for Wei, but I'd say 500k total Wang Wei's is probably a reasonable estimate, with around 300k being men.
Excellent points, thanks. Adds important resolution to the naming topic. However it does ruin my opening comedy a little. And in this house, we believe humour is more important than accuracy.
You generally get the gist but do over exaggerate too much (it's clear you're not Chinese). If factory worker Wang Wei truly is that patient and kind, some factory girls would notice. And yes, while a few Chinese surnames have more people than the country France, when it comes to (personal) naming, Chinese parents aren't generally trying to make their kid's name sound like every other (3 Wang Wei's sharing the same dorm room is exceedingly unlikely, unless they deliberately tried to live together as a joke). And Chinese don't have middle names.
The essay is emotionally effective but structurally dishonest. A Foxconn worker in Zhengzhou and a mother at the Shanghai marriage market do not inhabit the same social universe. A Foxconn worker's marriage barrier is absolute poverty. He cannot enter the market at all. A Fudan finance graduate's problem is relative status anxiety. He's in the market but losing the optimization game. These require fundamentally different diagnoses, not the same narrative arc. Collapsing them into one "Wang Wei" isn't insight. It's the oldest trick in English-language China writing: making complexity feel coherent by flattening it.
The structural problems you identify, housing privatization, the dismantling of social safety nets, the bride price arms race. They are real. But real problems deserve more than vibes journalism dressed up in Goldman Sachs vocabulary. Calling marriage an "M&A transaction" or bride price an "asset pricing model" gives the appearance of analytical rigor without any of the actual mechanism. What drives bride price inflation in Jiangxi is not what drives it in Gansu. Which policy failures matter most depends on which Wang Wei you're actually talking about.
One more thing: the first image says a lot. Low-end AI art with visibly broken Chinese text. If anyone with Chinese literacy had reviewed this piece before publication, that image and likely several of the generalizations it illustrates, would not have survived the edit.
I'd love to see you write an essay about the dating struggles of a yuppy in Silicon valley VS a blue-collar worker in the Deep South. Or about newbie banking consultant in NYC vs highschool graduate in "flyover country". Make sure to note the relative effects of much your family relocated, when it did so & from how far away!
Or you could accept both are one different parts of the same trail, & we're just looking at a height map anyways.
It’s funny you say that. I write about almost every country and bloc except the US, mostly because it already feels like the default setting for half the internet. I do have some half‑formed thoughts about the “collective West” sitting in drafts, but it’s hard to isolate American quirks without accidentally describing the entire Anglo world.
Are you talking specifically from a dating perspective (a topic that is beaten to death on substack) or something societal?
I was thinking the way you break down the systematic breakdown of the system. have you seen the documentary empire of dust? i think you would enjoy it.
I recommend you have a look at some of my other work, I have a fairly ecclectic scattering of subject matter, and if you enjoyed the breakdown style, a lot of my work follows a similar stucture.
As for Empire of Dust, I have seen it, it has a special place in my heart. I can also recommend this one, which carries a similar spiritual essence: Ascension (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14505430/)
It reads very LLM-written in parts, and pangram (the best AI detection tool) agrees. But I confess that I found it quite readable, while I usually get disgusted at noticeable AI use, so I think he's done some skilled prompting. Curious whether you suspected it was AI at all?
If you tripped over a bag filled with cash, will you stop to question the morality of how it got there, or will you pick it up and be glad you are one cash filled bag richer?
This isn't related to anything specific, just thought I would throw out a few items of food for a few moments of thought.
Ah, the plot thickens. So you're not a native English speaker!
To answer your question, I *would* definitely be suspicious of how it got there, and be on the lookout for drug lords and police sting operations, regardless of the morality.
But I'm not really against AI use per se, it's just generally a negative signal that writing hasn't been well thought through by the author.
I am indeed a native speaker. You can discern this by observing the scorn with which some of my other pieces are written. It's all about the scorn you see. I recommend these pieces to continue the baseline test inquisition:
If I tripped over a bag filled with cash, and someone asked me where I got it, I'd tell them. I definitely wouldn't invent some fictitious hard work by which I'd earned the money.
Well written essay. When I lived in China, women told me that they picked their husband because "he had the most money. Any other reason is impractical."
I began to see that China and Chinese were like the West and Whites, just more so in every aspect. Sort of a culture on steroids.
In America there is a similar problem, just with a different cause. Women only will marry up both in height and money. However, White men are getting ethnically cleansed from the top schools, unless they are Jewish or legacy. They are also getting cleansed from the more lucrative career tracks. This is creating the incels who, like their Chinese brethren, play games and watch and spend money on Only Fans cam girls.
White men in the US don't have it nearly as bad as men in China. Stop trying to paint white men as victims. It's pathetic. You don't have to actually get in to elite schools or even elite jobs, for one, to get a wife in the US. Also, generally, white guys have it the same or better than men of any other color/race in the US amongst women of almost all colors/races. And, in the US, there are many other "tracks" men could excel in, so you don't _have_ to be a loser. I mean, sure, most women aren't going want to enter long term relationships with guys with a loser mentality, no ambition, no personality, and are unstable financially, but women (definitely in the US) are _very_ varied in their tastes. So while in general, a woman has to admire a man in at least some ways to love him, there are multiple ways to achieve that. And finally, most men are taller than most women (and unlike what incels believe), most women don't care a ton about height so long as a man is the same height or taller.
While I agree with your assessment, are you not targeting the wrong group if your complaint is that Chinese men must get elite schooling, assets and excellence? What kind of environment, in a population of 1.5b, demands that a man must kill himself for the basic dignity of love?
I'm not saying that it's not fucked up in China. I'm saying that white men don't have it nearly as bad in the US, so trying to compare the plight of white men in the US to men in China is ridiculous and insulting.
Nobody is saying white men in America have it worse than Chinese men. Obviously they don’t, if we’re talking sheer structural brutality. By that logic, you could always just keep going: African men have it worse in plenty of places, lower-caste Indian men have it worse, men in war zones have it worse. Fine. True. But that doesn’t actually answer the point.
The point is that different societies warp male life in different ways.
In China, the pressure is brutally explicit: money, status, property, credentials. Love gets flattened into a balance sheet.
In the modern West, the pressure is softer, more disguised, but still real: a kind of indifference to male failure, contempt for weakness, and a mating market that increasingly rewards a narrow band of winners while a lot of men drift into irrelevance.
Those are not identical problems, and nobody sensible thinks they are. But it’s not ridiculous to notice a family resemblance. You can admit China is harsher without pretending the West is healthy.
Maybe the most important observation in this whole article.
“Children are invested in like they’re the last crop before winter.
Partners are evaluated like wartime rations.
The marriage market runs on the logic of scarcity even amid abundance, because the nervous system was built during scarcity and nervous systems don’t update when the spreadsheet does.”
Now add Hypergamy, the almost infinite possibly to meet someone better through the global sexual market place, the on-line monetization of women’s primary agency, and the resulting rise in ego inflation.
The collapse of an entire civilazation then becomes not an if, but a when.
I would love to hear the Indian perspective in this paradigm. I know a good amount about some cultural aspects surrounding relationship situations, but I'm not intimately familiar with the idiosyncrasies .
I hate this comment. Nearly everyone in this comment section is depraved. Most comments are some snide comparison about how this group or that person has it better than some other group, "So stop complaining!" Can we not have sympathy for a real person's agony, regardless of if someone else is experiencing the same pain and also has a splinter under their nail? Disgusting.
This seems like basically dating in America but cranked up to 11. To a large degree I feel like capitalism (and yes I consider China extreme capitalist in the sense of its society and values) encourages looking at the dating world as a meat market. I recently spoke to a woman who said a man recently demanded to know her weight in the initial messages. Obviously that's an outlier but look at other things like the filters on dating apps (race, age) and the lack of focus on the internal characteristics of a person. It shows the attitude behind the politeness: what are your stats and what do you cost.
The fact that these goods are human is quickly forgotten.
What I'm finding lately is that treating people as human is so rare that it's actually attractive. A way to stand out. Both in who I'm attracted to and the compliments I get. We've become a meaningless society that values people according to their output in dividends and orgasms alone. So to be the one who provides an escape from that is a way to stand out.
I'm in Korea (white guy, married with children). At my church are 3 young women approaching 30. None have had a serious relationship. One was talking about having high standards. It's bizarre. I'm sure they're virgins, wouldn't surprise me if they've never been kissed. Yet, one at least, was talking about high standards?
I've been talking about this with friends a lot. Westerners just do not understand how big a problem the materialism/quid pro quo culture in the Far East is to modern marriage.
I disagree entirely with your diagnosis that this is China's government's fault, though. Japan and especially Korea are experiencing the exact same catastrophe. Perhaps they aren't as brutally open about it the way the Chinese are, but Korea's on the way to extinction. SE Asia is well on the way, too.
I don’t think I made the point it is entirely the governments fault. The Chinese have had thousands of years to build upon the foundational structural issue resulting in the current dilemma.
The one child policy undoubtedly exacerbated it to current levels, but it is part of the larger problem. As you pointed out, the fact it exists in Korean, Singapore and other Han adjacent territories points to it being a societal/cultural issue also.
I did make the point in the essay that the entire idea was primed by a Singaporean twitter account lamenting the dating apocalypse in his country.
It is one of the contributing factors in my opinion. In isolation not solely responsible, but combined, along with one child policy, it contributed to an atmosphere that manifests it self in the current shape.
I'm ethnically Chinese (but British/American-educated), lived in China for 10 years (including my first "leftover" years - haha) and this tracks. And is also why I noped the fuck out. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
But also worth noting that ABCs and foreigners, after spending more than 2 years in China, are also undateable. For some, it is terminal. An exceptional few (not many) can be rehabbed at tremendous cost to any woman who picks them up after.
I would say steer clear and wait at least 4-6 years for them to purge the experience from their system. Especially if they lived in Shanghai or Beijing or Shenzhen. If they cave and move back to China (or worse, go to Southeast Asia or gag DUBAI), they are terminally undateable.
Them’s the breaks. Date and get married BEFORE you take that expat assignment, your benefits package will be way better. That's just good planning.
(Passport bros, this post is not for you. See my post on husbands and hunters. By all means go shoot your shot, just maybe get a vasectomy.)
For context, I am happily married with a family at the ripe ol' age of 36, so I now have zero skin in the game.
I appreciate the multiple references to terminal situations. It sounds like you are saying it’s specifically confined to place rather than culture. I would argue that it’s culture as evidenced by parallel Han adjacent ethnicities exhibiting similar preferences.
“The marriage market runs on the logic of scarcity even amid abundance, because the nervous system was built during scarcity and nervous systems don’t update when the spreadsheet does.” Period.
What a mess. I remember reading years ago about Chinese men kidnapping women and taking them out to a remote village to be his captive wife. After reading this, I can see how that could happen. Before it was truly puzzling to me.
Really good article. But I think it’s just kind of hinges on the fact that everyone doesn’t seem to disagree that girls should not have to drop their standards. I think it’s far or less about women dropping standards and more about being and getting real about who they actually are. I really think the price of pussy is way overrated. The juice just isn’t worth the squeeze.
Most women are delusional in the level of man that they can achieve in their lives. Your average woman thinks she’s capable of partnering with Henry Cavill but in reality she’s never going to pair with any man better than “Joe the plumber “. That’s what I mean when women should not drop their standards but more get real with who they can actually partner with.
This is a great piece. What sits underneath so much of it is the gender imbalance itself. The one-child policy collided with a deep cultural preference for sons. Ultrasound technology arrived in the 1980s. Families chose boys. The result: around 30 million more men than women in China today.
Then the effects cascade predictably...
Young men, especially rural and low-income, inherit the fallout: unaffordable real-world partnerships lead to isolation, with many turning to digital proxies for connection. They didn't choose the policy or abortions—prior generations did—but pay the steepest price.
Great article, exaggerated, at least according to my Chinese friends, it’s not that bad. They would say that, of course.
From a western perspective, the one child policy seems to have done the same thing feminism did here, turned marriage into a brutally elitist market, but with the opposite mechanism.
Here, the tool was liberation, individualism, the belief that we could afford to create a world where people could pursue what made them happy, not the practical, rational match they had been pressured into.
There, it’s family, tradition, the need to have a family for intergenerational care, not the romantic match they really wanted.
The result for both was a broken market for family. The delusions are insane: the west won’t admit that not having a family and dying alone are actually bad for the vast majority of people, and the east won’t admit that the emergent hierarchy makes love a miserable joke, not to mention what their deep avoidance of the underclass says about their “communism”. These societies are both dying, in their own way. The prognosis is terminal in their current forms.
The hardest thing to admit will be that the elitism is natural in people, that it wasn’t a socially constructed mistake traceable to capitalism or a straightforward moral failure. This is who we actually are, and the success enabled us to act on it. Mary only who you really want… and it’s always the rich, pretty one.
No one wants to tell people that they have to marry ugly or poor for the sake of social continuity, let alone tell them they have to marry ugly or poor because thats all they rate. They have to figure it out on their own. This is decadence. It has killed great societies before and will do it again.
Very sharp commentary. I agree with almost all of it. I’d only add that concepts like face, shame, and filial obligation matter here in ways that can’t be reduced to economics or to the structural features of the modern Chinese state. You see similar patterns, to varying degrees, across Han Chinese communities outside mainland China as well, which suggests something deeper than material conditions alone
Coming from the west, I respect that, though. We were all told to do what makes us happy, and what made us happy was doing whatever we want, putting off family until it was too late, not really putting in full effort to be successful or attractive.
There is still the hierarchy question: most of us could have worked hard and still had no prospects because success is relative. But we didn’t face the problem of delayed marriage at all. Parents trying to get their children to marry is pathetic and taboo here. Western media wants it to all be the fault of government or business or something, but it’s not. It’s just people. There’s not *enough* pressure, and no one would obey if there were more.
Face and filial piety are meant to guard against that, and I don’t think China would be in a better position if they didn’t exist, the men in particular might be even more lost.
All people are missing is wisdom. My kids will be raised with mine. It’s the insanity of modern society my only concern.
beautifully written. fucking depressing
This is not "beautifully written", this is gratingly AI written, to the point where I couldn't make it more than a quarter of the way (which is too bad because unlike most AI slop on Substack, this one seems actually to have some research and real world value).
It is interesting that the criticism is coming from a hologram that appeared on a podcast.
It's also interesting that you don't deny the accusation this piece was AI written. I Ran it by GPT-zero and Pangram labs, and they found, respectively, 66% and 100% chance of AI. I'm honestly quite impressed. I enjoyed the piece, and the constructions that gave me a niggle of AI I dismissed, perhaps because I read my sensations of enjoyment and interest as "quality" and equated "human written". This is the first AI written piece I actually retain positive feelings for after learning I'd been gulled. Nonetheless, while I understand your incentive to conceal its AI origin, I do think it's enough of a dark mark on your character that you failed to disclose your writing process that I wish you no success from your quality work.
Why does it matter if it was AI written?
No, it's not. Nice try, though. (We were upfront about it in a way that you are not, there was a good reason to do it because it provided something in addition to rather than instead of the text transcript I had agreed to because I like my privacy, and it was Dwarkesh's idea in the first place - I was entirely uninvolved after I signed off on the text of the transcript. And the voice was a human.)
Ok buddy.
You did some good editing for sure, but then a few sections are almost word-for-word repeated in a way that's totally unnecessary for flow. The "He read it and said 'she's right, though" and the bit about the note needing to fit into the umbrella (a few sentences on either side of each) immediately come to mind.
As this is the first post I've seen on this blog, my first assumption was that this had been possibly written by a human but translated by AI.
Does this even qualify as an ad hominem?
Even as someone who almost always hates obvious AI writing, I actually liked the first sixth. It did get annoying after a while though.
Well, that's exactly the most offensive stylistic property of AI writing, isn't it? The fact that, like candy, it's tasty in a small dose - but then that's all you get, candy after candy, in an endless monotonic back and forth of quips and witticisms in the same register and shape, forever.
I didn't catch this, and I think it says something about my limitations as a reader and writer that I didn't. I dismissed my questions of AI construction and enjoyed the piece throughout.
Exactly!
Is the fact that you enjoyed the piece, not enough?
The message was passed, regardless of the provenance of the article, was it not?
No, it was not passed, because of the provenance? Please see my previous 1-sentence comment, in which I stated that I did not receive the message because of the provenance.
I thought the message of the article was clear - I understood it as an exploration of the theme that modern relationships are transactional from a uniquely Chinese cultural perspective.
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In any case, I enjoyed the article and whether or not it was AI-generated does not diminish my appreciation of it, in any way.
I found it noticeably seasoned with AI but still well written.
Appreciate it
So fucking depressing is right. So glad my parents immigrated to America.
I concur. It evokes something evisceral I can't quite put my finger on.
People who aren’t from England shouldn’t be allowed to speak English.
ok buddy
Your writing style is very entertaining. This is a problem that every country is facing, it's just especially acute in China. It's human nature. Men want hot chicks and women want comfort and security. It was probably worse in tribal times and polygamous cultures before civilization forced monogamy on everyone.
Nitpicking a couple errors In your fictionalized story:
- There aren't 1.1 million men named Wang Wei. The figure is closer to a few hundred thousand.
- Wang Wei's parents wouldn't be at the Shanghai marriage market, because they're in Henan.
- A factory worker's profile would never be presented at the Shanghai marriage market, because the profile isn't competitive and it would be embarrassing for the parent. The marriage market is filled with profiles with impressive stats, but everyone is, like, old.
Thanks, valid criticism, taking some liberties for continuity and dramatic effect. My understanding is that the wang surname is around 100m people, so it wouldn’t be impossible that 1% have that first name also, but it is an approximation.
I agree that it is a human problem and not china specific problem. But I would add that it manifests in the same way as socialism with Chinese characteristics manifests….with distinctly Chinese characteristics.
Chinese given names are very diverse, in contrast to Chinese surnames which are very concentrated. It's directly opposite to Western names, where there is diversity in surnames but 3% of men are named John.
Interestingly, Xinhua has a news article about the name Wang Wei.
https://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/20/c_138721082.htm
There were 287,101 people named Wang Wei in 2019, but this is for the most common written form 王伟, with 伟 meaning 'greatness'. This stat is for both sexes, and 王伟 is a reasonable female name too. I don't have stats on other less common characters for Wei, but I'd say 500k total Wang Wei's is probably a reasonable estimate, with around 300k being men.
Excellent points, thanks. Adds important resolution to the naming topic. However it does ruin my opening comedy a little. And in this house, we believe humour is more important than accuracy.
You generally get the gist but do over exaggerate too much (it's clear you're not Chinese). If factory worker Wang Wei truly is that patient and kind, some factory girls would notice. And yes, while a few Chinese surnames have more people than the country France, when it comes to (personal) naming, Chinese parents aren't generally trying to make their kid's name sound like every other (3 Wang Wei's sharing the same dorm room is exceedingly unlikely, unless they deliberately tried to live together as a joke). And Chinese don't have middle names.
The essay is emotionally effective but structurally dishonest. A Foxconn worker in Zhengzhou and a mother at the Shanghai marriage market do not inhabit the same social universe. A Foxconn worker's marriage barrier is absolute poverty. He cannot enter the market at all. A Fudan finance graduate's problem is relative status anxiety. He's in the market but losing the optimization game. These require fundamentally different diagnoses, not the same narrative arc. Collapsing them into one "Wang Wei" isn't insight. It's the oldest trick in English-language China writing: making complexity feel coherent by flattening it.
The structural problems you identify, housing privatization, the dismantling of social safety nets, the bride price arms race. They are real. But real problems deserve more than vibes journalism dressed up in Goldman Sachs vocabulary. Calling marriage an "M&A transaction" or bride price an "asset pricing model" gives the appearance of analytical rigor without any of the actual mechanism. What drives bride price inflation in Jiangxi is not what drives it in Gansu. Which policy failures matter most depends on which Wang Wei you're actually talking about.
One more thing: the first image says a lot. Low-end AI art with visibly broken Chinese text. If anyone with Chinese literacy had reviewed this piece before publication, that image and likely several of the generalizations it illustrates, would not have survived the edit.
I'd love to see you write an essay about the dating struggles of a yuppy in Silicon valley VS a blue-collar worker in the Deep South. Or about newbie banking consultant in NYC vs highschool graduate in "flyover country". Make sure to note the relative effects of much your family relocated, when it did so & from how far away!
Or you could accept both are one different parts of the same trail, & we're just looking at a height map anyways.
"making the complexity feel coherent by flattening it"
It's not for Chinese only. It is usually an unsuccessful attempt to take a big subject and try ro distill it.
God damn. if only someone could write something this good about america.
It’s funny you say that. I write about almost every country and bloc except the US, mostly because it already feels like the default setting for half the internet. I do have some half‑formed thoughts about the “collective West” sitting in drafts, but it’s hard to isolate American quirks without accidentally describing the entire Anglo world.
Are you talking specifically from a dating perspective (a topic that is beaten to death on substack) or something societal?
I was thinking the way you break down the systematic breakdown of the system. have you seen the documentary empire of dust? i think you would enjoy it.
I recommend you have a look at some of my other work, I have a fairly ecclectic scattering of subject matter, and if you enjoyed the breakdown style, a lot of my work follows a similar stucture.
As for Empire of Dust, I have seen it, it has a special place in my heart. I can also recommend this one, which carries a similar spiritual essence: Ascension (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14505430/)
i was reading your piece about gdp. you are skilled at cutting through noise
It’s all about money, and nobody has enough.
It’s all so tiresome.
It reads very LLM-written in parts, and pangram (the best AI detection tool) agrees. But I confess that I found it quite readable, while I usually get disgusted at noticeable AI use, so I think he's done some skilled prompting. Curious whether you suspected it was AI at all?
If you tripped over a bag filled with cash, will you stop to question the morality of how it got there, or will you pick it up and be glad you are one cash filled bag richer?
This isn't related to anything specific, just thought I would throw out a few items of food for a few moments of thought.
Ah, the plot thickens. So you're not a native English speaker!
To answer your question, I *would* definitely be suspicious of how it got there, and be on the lookout for drug lords and police sting operations, regardless of the morality.
But I'm not really against AI use per se, it's just generally a negative signal that writing hasn't been well thought through by the author.
I am indeed a native speaker. You can discern this by observing the scorn with which some of my other pieces are written. It's all about the scorn you see. I recommend these pieces to continue the baseline test inquisition:
https://terminaldrift.substack.com/p/he-rapes-but-he-saves?r=wzwn0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://terminaldrift.substack.com/p/what-would-you-say-you-do-here?r=wzwn0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I also think there's something shiesty about playing coy when asked straightforward questions about using AI to write.
Is the obvious correct answer to stop and question the morality of how the bag of cash got there?
Agreed—and telling that the author thought otherwise.
Boy have I got a Coen brothers movie for you
If I tripped over a bag filled with cash, and someone asked me where I got it, I'd tell them. I definitely wouldn't invent some fictitious hard work by which I'd earned the money.
You do it!
Well written essay. When I lived in China, women told me that they picked their husband because "he had the most money. Any other reason is impractical."
I began to see that China and Chinese were like the West and Whites, just more so in every aspect. Sort of a culture on steroids.
In America there is a similar problem, just with a different cause. Women only will marry up both in height and money. However, White men are getting ethnically cleansed from the top schools, unless they are Jewish or legacy. They are also getting cleansed from the more lucrative career tracks. This is creating the incels who, like their Chinese brethren, play games and watch and spend money on Only Fans cam girls.
White men in the US don't have it nearly as bad as men in China. Stop trying to paint white men as victims. It's pathetic. You don't have to actually get in to elite schools or even elite jobs, for one, to get a wife in the US. Also, generally, white guys have it the same or better than men of any other color/race in the US amongst women of almost all colors/races. And, in the US, there are many other "tracks" men could excel in, so you don't _have_ to be a loser. I mean, sure, most women aren't going want to enter long term relationships with guys with a loser mentality, no ambition, no personality, and are unstable financially, but women (definitely in the US) are _very_ varied in their tastes. So while in general, a woman has to admire a man in at least some ways to love him, there are multiple ways to achieve that. And finally, most men are taller than most women (and unlike what incels believe), most women don't care a ton about height so long as a man is the same height or taller.
While I agree with your assessment, are you not targeting the wrong group if your complaint is that Chinese men must get elite schooling, assets and excellence? What kind of environment, in a population of 1.5b, demands that a man must kill himself for the basic dignity of love?
I'm not saying that it's not fucked up in China. I'm saying that white men don't have it nearly as bad in the US, so trying to compare the plight of white men in the US to men in China is ridiculous and insulting.
That’s kind of the wrong objection though.
Nobody is saying white men in America have it worse than Chinese men. Obviously they don’t, if we’re talking sheer structural brutality. By that logic, you could always just keep going: African men have it worse in plenty of places, lower-caste Indian men have it worse, men in war zones have it worse. Fine. True. But that doesn’t actually answer the point.
The point is that different societies warp male life in different ways.
In China, the pressure is brutally explicit: money, status, property, credentials. Love gets flattened into a balance sheet.
In the modern West, the pressure is softer, more disguised, but still real: a kind of indifference to male failure, contempt for weakness, and a mating market that increasingly rewards a narrow band of winners while a lot of men drift into irrelevance.
Those are not identical problems, and nobody sensible thinks they are. But it’s not ridiculous to notice a family resemblance. You can admit China is harsher without pretending the West is healthy.
I don’t think he’s saying the west is healthy. He’s saying white men are imagining their problems.
As they say.... the grass is always greener.
The entire article was about dating in China, what you're going off on was only a small participle. Hello
This writing elevates Substack.
High praise. Appreciate it.
Maybe the most important observation in this whole article.
“Children are invested in like they’re the last crop before winter.
Partners are evaluated like wartime rations.
The marriage market runs on the logic of scarcity even amid abundance, because the nervous system was built during scarcity and nervous systems don’t update when the spreadsheet does.”
Now add Hypergamy, the almost infinite possibly to meet someone better through the global sexual market place, the on-line monetization of women’s primary agency, and the resulting rise in ego inflation.
The collapse of an entire civilazation then becomes not an if, but a when.
Unless your country has no running water or electricity, then you pop out 5-10 kids to make up for it.
Felt sick reading this at my office in India. He is me and I am him.
May God give us faith and hope; not to find love, but to find beauty in this world despite the absence of love.
I would love to hear the Indian perspective in this paradigm. I know a good amount about some cultural aspects surrounding relationship situations, but I'm not intimately familiar with the idiosyncrasies .
IMO. That's silly. If you're a white collar guy, you actually have a decent amount of agency. Likely more than most guys in India.
I hate this comment. Nearly everyone in this comment section is depraved. Most comments are some snide comparison about how this group or that person has it better than some other group, "So stop complaining!" Can we not have sympathy for a real person's agony, regardless of if someone else is experiencing the same pain and also has a splinter under their nail? Disgusting.
This seems like basically dating in America but cranked up to 11. To a large degree I feel like capitalism (and yes I consider China extreme capitalist in the sense of its society and values) encourages looking at the dating world as a meat market. I recently spoke to a woman who said a man recently demanded to know her weight in the initial messages. Obviously that's an outlier but look at other things like the filters on dating apps (race, age) and the lack of focus on the internal characteristics of a person. It shows the attitude behind the politeness: what are your stats and what do you cost.
The fact that these goods are human is quickly forgotten.
What I'm finding lately is that treating people as human is so rare that it's actually attractive. A way to stand out. Both in who I'm attracted to and the compliments I get. We've become a meaningless society that values people according to their output in dividends and orgasms alone. So to be the one who provides an escape from that is a way to stand out.
I'm in Korea (white guy, married with children). At my church are 3 young women approaching 30. None have had a serious relationship. One was talking about having high standards. It's bizarre. I'm sure they're virgins, wouldn't surprise me if they've never been kissed. Yet, one at least, was talking about high standards?
I've been talking about this with friends a lot. Westerners just do not understand how big a problem the materialism/quid pro quo culture in the Far East is to modern marriage.
I disagree entirely with your diagnosis that this is China's government's fault, though. Japan and especially Korea are experiencing the exact same catastrophe. Perhaps they aren't as brutally open about it the way the Chinese are, but Korea's on the way to extinction. SE Asia is well on the way, too.
I don’t think I made the point it is entirely the governments fault. The Chinese have had thousands of years to build upon the foundational structural issue resulting in the current dilemma.
The one child policy undoubtedly exacerbated it to current levels, but it is part of the larger problem. As you pointed out, the fact it exists in Korean, Singapore and other Han adjacent territories points to it being a societal/cultural issue also.
I did make the point in the essay that the entire idea was primed by a Singaporean twitter account lamenting the dating apocalypse in his country.
Perhaps I misread the article, but you pinned a key moment on the privatization of the housing market, for instance.
I still think it's a great article, though, and the fable-style humanization of the process of failure to marry is fantastic.
It is one of the contributing factors in my opinion. In isolation not solely responsible, but combined, along with one child policy, it contributed to an atmosphere that manifests it self in the current shape.
I'm ethnically Chinese (but British/American-educated), lived in China for 10 years (including my first "leftover" years - haha) and this tracks. And is also why I noped the fuck out. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
But also worth noting that ABCs and foreigners, after spending more than 2 years in China, are also undateable. For some, it is terminal. An exceptional few (not many) can be rehabbed at tremendous cost to any woman who picks them up after.
I would say steer clear and wait at least 4-6 years for them to purge the experience from their system. Especially if they lived in Shanghai or Beijing or Shenzhen. If they cave and move back to China (or worse, go to Southeast Asia or gag DUBAI), they are terminally undateable.
Them’s the breaks. Date and get married BEFORE you take that expat assignment, your benefits package will be way better. That's just good planning.
(Passport bros, this post is not for you. See my post on husbands and hunters. By all means go shoot your shot, just maybe get a vasectomy.)
For context, I am happily married with a family at the ripe ol' age of 36, so I now have zero skin in the game.
I appreciate the multiple references to terminal situations. It sounds like you are saying it’s specifically confined to place rather than culture. I would argue that it’s culture as evidenced by parallel Han adjacent ethnicities exhibiting similar preferences.
I think she's implying the strongest strains of the disease are localized to the homeland.
Nope, that's not what I'm saying :) but I will expand on this in my own time as a separate thinky ramble.
“The marriage market runs on the logic of scarcity even amid abundance, because the nervous system was built during scarcity and nervous systems don’t update when the spreadsheet does.” Period.
What a mess. I remember reading years ago about Chinese men kidnapping women and taking them out to a remote village to be his captive wife. After reading this, I can see how that could happen. Before it was truly puzzling to me.
Still happens in some places in the world. I guess there is pragmatism behind every archaic behaviour.
Do they still do it?
Pretty sure they do. It was a widespread problem, and the conditions have not gone away.
Chinese men refuse to goon.
This must be studied.
Really good article. But I think it’s just kind of hinges on the fact that everyone doesn’t seem to disagree that girls should not have to drop their standards. I think it’s far or less about women dropping standards and more about being and getting real about who they actually are. I really think the price of pussy is way overrated. The juice just isn’t worth the squeeze.
> everyone doesn’t seem to disagree that girls should not have to
What?
Most women are delusional in the level of man that they can achieve in their lives. Your average woman thinks she’s capable of partnering with Henry Cavill but in reality she’s never going to pair with any man better than “Joe the plumber “. That’s what I mean when women should not drop their standards but more get real with who they can actually partner with.
This is a great piece. What sits underneath so much of it is the gender imbalance itself. The one-child policy collided with a deep cultural preference for sons. Ultrasound technology arrived in the 1980s. Families chose boys. The result: around 30 million more men than women in China today.
Then the effects cascade predictably...
Young men, especially rural and low-income, inherit the fallout: unaffordable real-world partnerships lead to isolation, with many turning to digital proxies for connection. They didn't choose the policy or abortions—prior generations did—but pay the steepest price.