Modern Dating: Foreign Women in China

Ok, so this has me stumped. Thinking of a scenario where I might end up single has become absolutely horrifying to me. ‘Why?”, you ask. Because modern dating is effed up!

Mr Li and I got together in 2011, so I have been off the dating market for the better part of a decade.

In all that while, I have had a number of friends still single and on the prowl, as it were…and the stories they bring back from the trenches are bad enough to put you off for life!

You can probably imagine where I am ultimately going with this – and you’re absolutely right – massive Tinder rant coming up in one of my next posts. But first, I would like to share some of my dating observations for “foreign women” – for want of a better term – in China.

Dating in China as a Foreign Woman
All in all, I’d summarize this as slim pickings. Many single Western women I knew in China would not really consider dating Chinese men. Which makes the dating pool quite a bit smaller as you can imagine.

Add to that the fact that you will encounter a considerable amount of foreign (read “white”) guys running around China who have more or less severe cases of yellow fever, so once again the pool shrinks. Of course, not all white guys, yes, yes. But still a substantial enough amount that those “plenty of fish in the sea” for foreign women amount to maybe just 50% of male foreigners in any given town. And since COVID it has gotten even rougher.

🧐 Let’s look at some figures 🧐

According to the Beijinger, a census published in 2020 showed that the number of foreigners in Beijing dropped from over 107,000 in 2010 to just under 63,000 in 2020. Shanghai dropped from 208,000 to 163,000.

We can all imagine why…

But for Western women still holding the fort in 2022 – and we imagine those to be even fewer now than two years ago, thanks to the Shanghai lockdown in particular – that means if we assume a fifty-fifty gender split (not accurate math, I know, I know), there are now a generous estimate of around 30,000 foreign males in Beijing and 80,000 foreign males in Shanghai.

So, again working with rudimentary guesswork maths, if half of those males are focused on dating Chinese women, that leaves our Beijing ladies with 15,000 and our Shanghai ladies with 40,000 male specimens.

But this doesn’t even include the number of foreign males in partnerships! I can’t tell you that exact figure sadly. What I did find was the number of Chinese- foreign marriages over the span of 40 years: around 20,000 in Beijing. So that comes to about 500 per year – which is negligible.

Again, please don’t quote this maths exercise as academically sound in any way, shape or form!

So, let’s continue with the sketchy maths to compare Berlin, Germany’s capital with our two Chinese cities. Berlin has a 36% singles population, so about 1.3 million. Let’s assume a 50-50 gender split again. That leaves 650k eligible bachelors in the city.

650k in Berlin versus 15k in Beijing! And that is being generous! 🤯🤯🤯

I mean, WOW! Even I didn’t think it would be this bad…😵

And that’s not even looking at intersectionality. I was always in awe at black women I met in China, since the racism towards POC can be pretty severe, depending on where in the country you live. Can you imagine how difficult it must be to find someone as a black woman in China? 🥺

I guess we needn’t wonder anymore that the No.1 complaint I heard from Western women regarding China was that it was a terrible place to try and find your big love.

Of course, these ladies could also consider a Chinese man, but still, few of them do. Even if they did, though, most Chinese men I know are paired up out of university, and since they marry so much quicker and younger, for a Western woman over 30 – it’s pretty much a desert out there…

So, that’s it for today on the dodgy math front. Look forward to my upcoming post looking at Tinder dating. In the meantime, feel free to share your thoughts on this article or your China dating experience!

Bye-bye!

Feature image by Josh Hild on Unsplash