What Happens to China’s Surplus Men?

Violet Du Feng’s documentary The Dating Game, now in theaters in New York City, follows these men’s attempts to reboot their dating lives in the wake of China’s former one-child policy. A long-standing preference for sons created one of the world’s starkest gender imbalances. “We have no women,” Hao says. Indeed, in 2015, the year the policy ended, about 116 boys were born for every 100 girls in China—likely condemning almost one in five boys to a lifetime of singledom.

Feng’s protagonists are wracked with self-doubt and anxiety over their poor romantic prospects. Pressure to marry comes from every direction—families, friends, and even the state itself, which openly pesters young people to get married and have children.

Hao claims to have more than 3,000 clients, most of them working-class men—the least likely demographic to find wives in a country where owning an apartment is often considered a necessary precursor to marriage. Though he dismisses them as failures, Hao says they deserve a chance at love. Yet as the bachelors’ journeys unfold, viewers may begin to question Hao’s methods—and worry about the social fallout from a dating system that, by failing to deliver the success it promises, can drive men toward the dangerous politics of resentment.

We first meet our wannabe lotharios at a mall in Chongqing, China. Over the course of a week, Hao promises to teach them how to attract women in today’s digital age. Zhou, 36, is the most skeptical. He balks at Hao’s fashion advice, saying people back home would be shocked to see him wearing a pink shirt with bold lettering. At the salon, Zhou remarks, “I’m not good-looking. What’s the point in styling?” A stylist responds, “It downplays the weakness of how your face is shaped.” Such blunt remarks repeatedly assail the dignity of our protagonists. Equally blunt are the bachelors’ own observations about China’s money-driven dating culture. Zhou laments that taking a woman to dinner, buying a gift, and paying a matchmaker’s fee could cost him $300—half his monthly income. Later, a woman says her ideal partner would make “more than $1,500 a month.”

To compensate for their economic disadvantage, Hao essentially teaches the bachelors to fake it, sometimes advising them to outright lie. For instance, we see the men posing for dating profile pictures in luxury high-rises—and, in a moment of levity, with a dozen or so Huskies, even though Zhou is clearly afraid of dogs. (Big dogs are technically illegal in many Chinese cities, making them a status symbol.) Zhou hesitates to use his new profile pictures because they depict experiences he’s never had. Women will see through it, he insists. Hao counters by arguing that everyone deceives online. Wu objects, “I don’t like to pretend. I am who I am.” Hao simply tells them not to concern themselves with authenticity.

As he coaches the men through excruciating dating exercises—including approaching random women on the street to ask for their WeChat information—viewers begin to suspect that he is underqualified. The men are desperate for authentic connection found the old-fashioned way, yet they are still instructed to spend a full day swiping right indiscriminately for leads.

Feng presents their failures (and rare, shocking successes) without comment, allowing viewers to form their own opinions on Hao’s methods. But eventually it becomes apparent that these so-called techniques are really just pickup artist (PUA) moves.

Something of an underground movement dating back to the 1960s, pickup artistry exploded into the mainstream following the release of Neil Strauss’s 2005 book The Game. Relying on psychological manipulation and cheap techniques to seduce women, PUA has been widely condemned for objectifying women and encouraging men to pursue romantic or sexual conquests far beyond reasonable boundaries.

In recent years, PUA has spawned a mutant relative in the “manosphere”: a loose collection of online communities that espouse misogynistic views and, in more fanatical cases, advocate for violence to restore traditional gender hierarchies. As investigative journalist James Bloodworth documents in Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere, the expansive networks of men’s rights groups, PUA organizations, “involuntary celibate” forums, and fringe misogynist influencers are linked. For example, before going on a killing spree in 2014, the British American murderer Elliot Rodger complained about his inability to get a girlfriend, partially blaming the failure of PUA techniques for his romantic impotence.

The PUA-to-manosphere pipeline is coated with the grimy assumption that if you plug in the correct variables—whether a neg, flamboyant gesture, or suggestive touch—you will “acquire” a girlfriend. But no matter how much you peacock, or how witty your opening line is, eventually you have to form a genuine bond with another human being.

The strongest evidence for this comes not from the bachelors’ trials but from Hao’s own marriage to Wen, a fellow dating coach. Their relationship forms the film’s surprising emotional center, almost overshadowing the bootcamp. Where the bootcamp is cringey and silly, Feng’s access to Hao and Wen is intimate and tense, almost scandalous. Should we really be witnessing this?

Wen is, in many ways, Hao’s foil. To the women she coaches, she preaches authenticity and self-improvement—the kind that requires hard work and introspection. Hao’s methods feel dark, ugly, and doomed in contrast. Wen even says that these tactics were the parts of Hao she initially disliked and found insincere. The gap between these approaches and mentalities is tragic and baffling. As an audience, we are not given much insight into what prompted Wen to push through Hao’s firehose of pickup sludge to see his better side, nor what keeps these two together. They seem to have diametrically opposed views of not only how to date, but of how to understand human interactions and how to value humans as individuals. This friction becomes so unbearable that I had to avert my eyes more than once.

To viewers watching this unfold, it is somewhat confounding why thousands of men are supposedly signing up for this awful advice.

One reason for Hao’s appeal is that many rural, working-class men grew up with almost no interaction with girls. Li, 24, says there “are only a few girls for every dozen boys” in his village. Many parents, meanwhile, migrated to cities to work in the rapid national industrialization effort, leaving children to be raised by grandparents. In an archival clip, then-leader Deng Xiaoping implores citizens to modernize China quickly, because if the country cannot provide a good life to its people, it will become a dead end.

Feng’s inclusion of that footage in the current moment feels particularly pointed, given that China is facing an economic slowdown that has generated widespread youth frustration. With an official urban youth unemployment rate of around 17 percent, and with the largest university class on record graduating in 2026, young Chinese are entering the workforce burdened with a distinctive malaise. These economic challenges cast a gloomy shadow over an entire generation’s romantic prospects. And in a country infamous for its “996” work system, there is a growing sense that everything they’ve strived so ruthlessly toward has been something of a mirage. So great is some young people’s feeling of economic and social futility, and so tied is one’s income to finding success in dating, that some men and women choose to withdraw from dating entirely.

Those who stay in the dating pool may resort to unconventional means. Hao’s coaching is just one such approach, but Feng also shows us various attempts at matchmaking, including one rather depressing gathering of parents hoping to find partners for their adult children.

Elsewhere, at a state-sponsored matchmaking event, a Communist Party representative tells the gathered singles that they are “the future.” Participants list desired traits for their potential partners—“obedient,” “[has] a job,” “not too fat”—and play awkward icebreaker games. When a pair successfully couples up, the hosts demand they hug and hold hands, wishing them a happy future marriage. With a plummeting birthrate, tact has been discarded.

There’s anger here from Feng—over the one-child policy, over families separated for economic gains that now seem illusory, over the structures that hamper Chinese youths’ efforts to be a little less lonely—though it’s tempered by genuine sympathy for those struggling to navigate modern life. For the most part, she critiques the state’s missteps with subtlety; documenting them is condemnation enough.

Her most direct political statement comes late in the film: “Historically, a surplus of men in a society has led to domestic and geopolitical instability,” reads the on-screen text. Though the film’s careful restraint is wonderful for illuminating its characters’ lived experiences and the struggles of dating in China more broadly, this particular point demands something that subtlety cannot provide. The Dating Game nods to the potential society-wide danger of millions of discontented men, but it spends scant time examining the urgent question of how exactly a nation arrives there.

The romantic pressure being loaded onto Chinese men matters. It matters because when foiled in love, men have sometimes turned to violence—a primal exorcising of their feelings of failure and resentment, today nurtured on social media by manosphere influencers and lifestyle gurus who have long rallied around the flags of far-right movements, whether in the United States, Turkey, or the United Kingdom.

This ecosystem of male resentment is growing in power in China and across the globe, and pickup artistry is just the beginning. The manosphere is an unwieldy, disjointed monster, to be sure, but The Dating Game has touched a vein so rich in its toxicity that it demands an equally rich excavation.