LUCAS DE LA CAL Qingdao (China)

Qingdao (China)

Updated Thursday, February 15, 2024-00:04

After two Chinese New Year holidays working as

a rental bride

, and another two of confinement at home due to the pandemic closures, Shui has finally been able to spend these holidays with her family. She left her job last fall and now, at 26, she is trying to make her way as a

streamer

selling cosmetics on an e-commerce platform.

In 2020 we met her in Tianjin, northern China. She was quite nervous because she was going to spend an entire week with a client who paid her

1,176 euros

a day to accompany him to her hometown during the New Year. The young woman states that she only rented her time, never her body.

"He was a gay businessman with a very traditional family. His parents kept pressuring him to get married and have children. He was afraid to tell them the truth, so he hired me to pose as his partner. Last year, when The restrictions due to the pandemic were over, I returned to him to continue with the film," reveals Shui.

A few months ago, a heated debate broke out on Chinese social media about the

extreme pressure young people face to get married

after an investigative report published by a Chinese journalist who posed as a customer on a rental bride website. There he met Mumu, an administrator who earned an extra salary for a daily rate of 170 euros.

She said that some of her clients, almost all of them over thirty, had even paid her to act as the bride at a fake wedding, with a banquet included. Others were single people from very rural areas who hired her during national holidays to accompany them to town.

"During Chinese New Year, there are always 1,000 new users who need a girlfriend to present to their parents," said

Cao Tiantian

, founder of Hire Me Plz, in an interview, one of several applications in the Asian giant where women and men They offer themselves as rental boyfriends.

The last census carried out (in 2021) announced that 220 million single people lived in China, 13.3% of the population. The census also revealed that the country had almost 35 million more single men than women, and that most of them were between 20 and 40 years old.

Qingdao, on the east coast of China, is

a city famous for its beer festival and its German colonial heritage

. It has also been in the news because local authorities have created a dating app to match singles.

In Shandong, the province where Qingdao is located, there are many localities where the youth of the Communist Party have organized

group dating parties to match singles

. Everything is so that, in a society that is still marked by very conservative times, young people get married, have children and help stop the current demographic disaster.

Much of the world celebrated Valentine's Day on Wednesday, but in China, where it is known as

the Qixi Festival

, it doesn't come until the seventh month of the lunar calendar, which usually falls in August. On the last Valentine's Day, the government of a city in the province of Sichuan thought that, since many weddings are usually celebrated on that day, it was going to broadcast the ceremonies live. But there was a problem: not a single couple appeared in the registry to get married.