Chinese online dating giant Zhenai.com shows money still driver in politically incorrect matchmaking world
Website founder says that single men tend to receive more digital “winks” the higher their salary, while the number of winks women get starts to tail off after they earn more than US$7,600 a month
When it comes to dating, Chinese men are most interested in what women look like, while women want to know about a man’s income. The next consideration is a prospective partner’s profession: primary-school teachers and nurses are in high demand among men, while women favour men in IT or finance – areas men least want their partner to be working in.
That’s according to Dr Song Li, founder of Zhenai.com, one of China’s biggest matchmaking sites – who apologises if his findings may not seem “politically correct”.
“We have such a big database. Professors at the University of Hong Kong or a university in the UK or US might be interested in using our data to study the psychology of love,” says Li, who has the infectious enthusiasm and quirky personality commonly seen among bona fide serial entrepreneurs. “I’d love it if our data could contribute to society.”
He’s not kidding about the volume of data. Zhenai.com says it has 120 million registered users, and new users join the dating platform at a rate of 40,000 to 50,000 a day.
Born in a suburb of Shanghai, Li trained as a molecular biologist at Cornell University in the US and, after realising he wasn’t suited to fiddling with Petri dishes in a lab, switched to Columbia University, where he earned a PhD in finance.