In the city of Guixi, China, the government introduced an official matchmaking app for citizens to get marry.
With 640 thousand people living in the city, this app will collect the data of single residents and select a suitable partner for them.
The app is known as “Palm Guixi” and includes a platform for organizing blind dates.
According to China’s official newspaper, citizens can also meet each other by contacting through the app.
Guixi is in Jiangxi province. The government has taken measures to increase the marriage rate in the whole province. This app is part of those measures.
The marriage rate in this province has declining for the past 10 years, with an average of 5.4 marriages per 1,000 people in 2021.
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Elsewhere in Jiangxi, local governments are organizing in-person events to bring people together. In Gao’an City, about 100 young singles attended an event at Ruizhou Fuya park where they could dress up in traditional costumes, play games and get “closer” to each other while experiencing the “depth of Chinese culture”.
Online reactions to the state-run matchmaking app service have mixed. Many commenters on Weibo linked it to the government’s push to boost China’s rapidly declining birth rate. However, one user writes that Chinese people expected to “breed like pigs”.