ZHOU YI is a lonely guy. 'Every day, on my way home, to the office or to meet clients, I see dozens of decent girls walk by who might live up to my standards, but I just have no way of being introduced to them naturally,' says the Shanghainese.
With his master's degree in computer science from Beijing University of Posts and Communications, the 27-year-old started work as a network engineer at Shanghai Telecom last year.
On the face of it, one might think such a promising young man would have no trouble finding his ideal partner. But Zhou says he finds it difficult to make friends with women at his company, where work dictates that he spends most of his time alone.
The answer? Get a doctorate, and get online. As the traditional, arranged methods of meeting partners peter out in an increasingly westernised China, another force is coming into play that's making that choice even harder for some - the soaring expectations of the country's increasingly higher educated females.
Last May, East China Normal University conducted a survey on love, marriage and sex. The poll, of 662 female graduate students in five Shanghai universities, found that 23.7 per cent of respondents said they had never had a boyfriend. Xu Anqi, a professor at Shanghai Academy of Social Science, puts it down to a traditional way of thinking in Chinese society. 'Men tend to settle for girlfriends with a relatively equal or lower social status, while women expect more of their future husbands than of themselves,' she says.
For the past two years, more than two million people a year have graduated from mainland universities. And, as the number of female graduates increases and their degrees progress from bachelors to masters to doctorates, their higher standards are turning the dating game among the mainland's educated elite into a dilemma.