In China they have had an idea to defuse the demographic bomb that shadows their future: “top blankets” of love

Shanghai is a powerful financial center, with a booming stock market and hundreds of multinational headquarters. However, if one walks around on a Sunday afternoon People’s Parkin the Huangpu district, you will come across a market that seems straight out of another time. And not because their stalls sell crafts, spices or livestock. What we will see are parents determined to sell your unmarried children like great matches with which to start a family.

Their goal is to capture the interest of other potential in-laws or marriage agency employees hired by other families. It may seem picturesque, but it is further proof of the demographic bomb that takes shape in China.

A marriage market? Exact. And as a good market it is, we will find supply, demand, brochures and people committed to give notoriety to your ‘merchandise’although these are single children of matchmaking age who in many cases do not even know that their parents are there ‘selling’ them.

That is the peculiar image that can be found on Sunday afternoons in the People’s Park from Shanghai (Rénmín Gōngyuán), where people meet who are looking for couples to start families with, parents concerned about the sentimental life of their children and agencies specialized in finding matches.

Is it something new? No. There are references that go back to more than a decade. In fact, it is believed that the Shanghai marriage market started in 2004when parents began to act as matchmakers in the same place where their children gathered to attend dance classes or play sports.

Shanghai is not the only place in China where these peculiar ‘love fairs’ are organized. We can also find them in parks Beijing, Canton either ChengduFor example. However, neither their popularity nor their antiquity has caused the interest they arouse among foreign tourists to decline.

And what are those markets like? A quick Google search brings up articles on the topic of The Economist, South China Morning Post, The Paris Review either The Worldto name just a handful of examples. They are all recent and they all tell their readers the spectacle of the Shanghai market with a mixture of fascination and exoticism. And it is more than understandable.

At fairs like the one in Huangpu you can find parents loaded with copies of the sentimental resume of their children, sheets in which they report their height, age, hobbies and (most importantly) if they have good salaries or a home they own. These leaves are hung from poles or open umbrellas, which recently led a reporter from The World to define it as a “top love blanket”.

Why is it important? The fact that there are parks where suitors meet and, above all, parents concerned that their 35-year-old son is still single or a 38-year-old daughter is the only one in her group of friends who has not yet had children is striking. Just like the fact that there are agencies that They charge up to 1,000 euros for placing their clients’ resumes in the best places in the park, those where they will have the best chance of finding a suitor.

However, if ‘marriage markets’ like the one in Shanghai generate so much interest, it is because of their social background. Cultural issues aside, they connect with one of the main headaches that Xi Jinping’s Government has been dealing with for years: the ‘demographic bomb’ that takes shape in China.

Although for decades the problem was overpopulation and high birth rates, which led him to embrace until 2015 the ‘one child’ policyright now the challenge is another, of the opposite nature: birth rate falls, population falls, society ages and increasingly common to see single-person households.

What do the data tell us? That parents who go to Parque del Pueblo with their children’s curriculum under their arms are the manifestation of a larger phenomenon. The Chinese authorities estimate that there are more than 240 million of single adults and there are studies that talk about 125 million of single-person households, which represents a radical break with the traditional concept of home in which up to four generations lived together under the same roof.

The problem, after decades of application of the ‘one-child policy’, is that the gender division of this mass of singles is not balanced: there are 30 million more of men than women. As a backdrop, a nation in which demographic indicators are beginning to paint a worrying picture.

In 2025 the country scored its lowest birth rate and saw the population shrink for the fourth year in a row. This trend has contributed, among other things, to China have lost the crown of the most populous country on the planet, but above all it worries about its implications social and economic.

Is it only seen in the markets? Not at all. Marriage markets are part of a much larger and more complex mosaic that demonstrates how demographics (in their various manifestations) are becoming an obsession for part of Chinese society. And also his Government.

In addition to fairs like the one in Shanghai, initiatives have been emerging in the country of all kinds for promote birth: matchmaking programs, subsidies…the Government has even gone so far as to make more expensive the price of condoms or activated, through the Communist Party (CCP), a kind of Tinder for young people.

Images | Wikipedia (Jpbowen) and Luca Casartelli (Flickr)

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