Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match…now

Whoever conceptualised the Chinese reality dating show Fei Cheng Wu Rao was a hard-nosed realist. Like Tinder IRL, this is a show where soulmates match in fifteen minutes. Contestants extinguish light-up panels like they’re swiping left on some hopeful’s profile.

For many people, reality dating is to television what candy floss is to a healthy balanced diet. So naturally, FCWR has drawn its share of flak—derided by Chinese censors for a whole range of bimbotic sins, from promoting materialism, to “mak[ing] light of serious social issues”.

But here’s my defense. For all its levity, FCWR is a window into the society that birthed it. To watch a 90-minute episode is precisely to see “serious social issues” unfold, glowing under the bright studio lights.

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Conceptually, FCWR is simple. Each episode begins with 24 female contestants behind light-up rostrums. Once they’ve fanned out, a male contestant descends from a pod centre-stage, to DJ Jean-Roch’s ‘Can You Feel It’. In a past life, this song was also the French football team’s Eurocup theme tune— which should tell you about how much subtlety it promises, i.e. none.

His grand entrance made, the male contestant then spends fifteen minutes on a heroic show of self-promotion. Meanwhile, the women stab him bluntly with questions, turning off their rostrum lights (mie deng) if they lose interest. The goal of the show is for successful pairings to materialise.

This is speed-dating on steroids, pumped and relentless. It even includes ‘relationship experts’ who sit on the show’s sidelines, and butt in to offer advice at opportune moments. Sometimes, they also step in to gently castigate contestants for being too materialistic or superficial... because millennials, lol, we need guidance.

More efficient than The Bachelor and (somewhat) less gimmicky than Ex on the Beach, FCWR is a curious amalgam of East and West. The odd contestant might demand filial piety of their potential mate. But generally, they rubbish the coy, orientalist stereotypes attached to East Asian dating. In one of my favourite exchanges, a woman asks the male contestant— whom she met just 10 minutes ago— if he minds breast augmentation surgeries, because she intends to get one and expects her future partner to foot half the bill.

A critic might label these women desperate for dating on TV. A kinder soul might, more accurately, call them socially anxious. Yet, anxiety seems unwonted in such a desirable troupe of women. Most are urbanites not yet 30. Some have attended elite institutions: when an Englishman from Oxford materialises, three women schooled at Oxford, Cambridge and the London School of Economics banter over who would be the best match for him.

There are also career women who know what they want and aren’t afraid get theirs. In another show of the same genre, Fei Chang Wan Mei, a woman in the wine business ferociously woos a male contestant by downing consecutive glasses of wine— effectively harming her liver until he gives in to her advances. (He doesn’t, but this doesn’t make her attack any less gutsy.)

So here’s the big question. Why these qualified, intelligent, and very determined women chosen to appear on national television, confiding their deepest hopes and fears to the abyss that is the media?

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For starters, we need to understand that singlehood comes down hard on the urbane Chinese woman. Single women tend to be painted by the media as rebels, who wilfully obstruct social progress by not settling down. The state has played some role in this, having issued an edict in 2007 which blamed educated women for being too picky about their husbands, ignoring their biological clocks, and tipping the gender ratio even more violently into the red. In the years since, the women have been accused of choosing their PhDs over motherhood— even of “going to nightclubs to search for one-night stand[s]”, instead of playing happy families. While ‘bare branches’— or single men— tend to be pitied, their female counterparts are often held up as selfish and materialistic ‘progressives’, who must be hastily ushered into marriage for China’s good. Your average bachelorette, then, is being sold a doctrine of ‘cha bu duo’— that famous Chinese call to make do with what you can get, not strive for Mr Perfect. But what to make of the fact that in her world, hypergamy— or the practice of ‘marrying up’ — is also the norm?

A FCWR clip of viral infamy involves a contestant declaring that she would rather cry in the back of a BMW, than smile on the back of a bicycle. It caused a huge fuss, both in and out China. Yet, it cuts right to the heart of what FCWR is about: elite ladies fighting for even more elite partners, searching for those rare gods among men who can match— if not eclipse— their own triumphs. For all the state’s talk about ‘cha bu duo’, these women still inhabit a world where good men marry ‘down’, and good women, ‘up’. Three years ago, 55 percent of tertiary-educated men picked less educated spouses. Only 32 percent of women did the same.

The point is that the single, desirable Chinese woman has been socialised to expect a partner who is better educated than her, and more financially secure. But vocalising this desire will leave her condemned by the state— and more broadly, by the society that conditioned her beliefs to begin with. It’s a scary, complicated kind of tension, that FCWR embodies perfectly. These women are on TV because they’re acceding to state norms, dutifully man-hunting as instructed. And yet, they’re hunting on their own terms— refusing to settle, chasing perfection, stalking that one, golden boy in the spotlight.

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For reasons lost in translation, the English name adopted by FCWR’s producers is ‘If You Are the One’. But a direct translation of the show’s Mandarin name — ‘if you’re not sincere, do not disturb me’— might distill its essence more succinctly, capturing the social pressures that lurk behind it. I’ve always preferred it, anyway.

Art and words by Cheang Ming