Remember in high school when you learned about China’s one child policy (1979-2015), which was meant to hopefully control the country’s skyrocketing population growth, by limiting each couple to a single offspring? Along with that we would also usually hear the shocking lengths some parents would go to secure a male child, which society deemed more valuable. Female babies were often abandoned or sent abroad for adoption, leaving the country with a stark shortage of girls. Now here we are 9 years post policy and we’re witnessing the after effects this gender disparity has created, which could best be described as a gender chasm, flipping the country’s power dynamic into the complete opposite direction. Violet Du Feng’s followup to Hidden Letters, the charming and unexpectedly hilarious The Dating Game, documents a country now in the “find out” stage of this edict’s after effects.
While we know dating in our current chronically online world is bad enough for those subjected to it, try that in a country where men now outnumber women by about 30 million. Women now hold the power to continue this society, but are faced with men – who thanks to the lack of female friends growing up and mothers who left them to work in urban factories, lack the soft skills needed to create meaningful connections with the opposite gender. That is where our subjects come in – in the technological metropolis of Chongqing, one of the biggest Chinese cities you’ve probably never heard of, with a population of 36 million. The film follows Li – 24, Wu – 27 and Zhou – 36, three hapless kind hearted rural men, who have paid handsomely to come to the big city for a 7 day intensive dating bootcamp to hopefully find wives.
This boot camp has the pompous Hao (think Mystery from The Pickup Artist) struggling to impart his shallow pickup techniques on his awkward, yet well meaning pupils, as they all struggle with their manipulative nature. After all, it’s made very clear these guys are all looking for actual wives, not simply hook-ups. The big twist here however is the slick dating coach, who claims to have about 3,000 clients – his wife Wen, is also a dating coach and not afraid to speak her mind. These glimpses of Hao’s homelife where his no-nonsense wife lets him know just how out of touch his ideology is, play out in stark contrast to him forcing his students to bombard random women who are way out of league with the scammy pick up lines like: “You look like a classy lady. Can I add you on WeChat?”
The film is as much about the effects of the Policy and the hapless men forced to deal with its fallout as it is about the gender gap and about the ideologies and beliefs fueling it, which is not just a Chinese problem. Korea, Japan and even America are seeing a real divide amongst the genders, because of these outdated ideas of traditional gender roles and the women who are simply fine with sitting it out. This move has triggered declining birth rates in Japan and Korea and has governments on high alert. While we do have Hao, who is sort of attempting to maintain these gender norms and in the process of losing his own marriage, it’s his students who are tasked with executing these techniques who are actually realizing that maybe this isn’t the way we should do things going forward – so there might be hope after all.
