China's Virtual Boyfriends Offer Intimacy To Career-Focused Young Women, At A Price

Social anthropologists will be very interested in a Chinese woman named Robin (not her real name). At age 19 she spends hours chatting online with a young man who listens to her problems, provides companionship and gives her feelings of intimacy. This is all very normal except that Robin has shelled out about 1,000 yuan ($140) to have the “virtual boyfriend” experience. And the numbers of young women like Robin are growing.

To buy a virtual friend, people can simply go to a Chinese messaging app like WeChat or an e-commerce site like Taobao. Single women under the age of 30 with disposable incomes make up most of the customers for this service.

One man who earns money as a virtual boyfriend is 22-year-old Zhuansun Xu. He works in Beijing during the day but in the evening, he chats with females who pay him to be their “boyfriend”. He claims that he fills a variety of needs from offering friendly advice to uttering romantic words.

Xu said, “While we’re interacting, I tell myself: I really am her boyfriend, so how can I treat her well? But after we’re done, I’ll stop thinking this way.” Virtual boyfriends can earn just a few yuan up to a few thousand yuan as a monthly retainer for continued monthly exchanges.

Seeking marriage, a committed relationship or even a sexual encounter does not seem to be a factor as to why young Chinese women seek this service. One theory is that women, in general, are more verbal than men, craving intimacy over other needs.

The real reason is likely more societal. According to Sandy To, a sociologist at the University of Hong Kong, China’s one-child policy in effect from 1979 to 2013 created a “generation of self-confident and resourceful women” and ended the traditional patriarchal thinking that marriage was a “must” for young women.

What did not change during the one-child policy era was a preference for baby boys. Female fetuses were more likely to be aborted in the Communist country or baby girls were simply abandoned. Parents who did raise female children “raised them as sons”, says Roseann Lake, author of a book on China’s unmarried women. “All of those things that traditionally you needed to find in a man – a house, financial security – they were raised with it,” she says. The other product of the one-child policy is that in 2018, the country still had the world’s most skewed gender ratio, at 114 boys born for every 100 girls.

Chris KK Tan, an associate professor at Nanjing University says that while the young urban women are materially better off, their lives in a single child household were isolating”. Most spent their teenage years studying for the country’s rigorous university entrance exams, at the cost of developing relationships outside school. He says that buying virtual boyfriends “is their chance to experiment with love and relationships.”

For Robin, a virtual companion appeals to her because of the convenience. “If I have serious psychological stress, this could make some people think I’m being fussy,” said Robin. “But because I’m giving [the virtual companions] money, they have to reassure me.”

Chris KK Tan says that “People have figured out how to commodify affection” calling the phenomenon “…a new mode of womanhood that is unprecedented in China.”