Bulletins

A Chinese city is creating a government-sponsored 'Tinder'

A Chinese city is creating a government-sponsored 'Tinder'
(Photo by Guang Niu/Getty Images)

Forget Tinder, Grindr or Hinge: A local municipal government in northern China’s Hebei province is building a database of single people in the city of Luanzhou to help them match with their perfect date.

The party secretary of the city of Luanzhou announced Monday that the municipal government is mapping data about the city’s single women and men, and has distributed a form that asks unmarried young people to sign up for government organized-dating activities, according to The Paper, a Chinese digital newspaper that’s overseen by the Shanghai Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Luanzhou’s various local government agencies are required to collect personal information about unmarried youth, including their gender, profession, financial status and family background, to enrich the database.

The local official also revealed that the city had stepped up the effort in match-making for civil servants and workers at state-owned enterprises by hosting two group dating parties this year. And the government will host one more virtual dating party on the last day of 2021 via the short-video platform Douyin, the Chinese original of TikTok.

Shen Lu

Shen Lu is a former Protocol reporter, covering China's tech industry.

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