Finding True Love: Parental Matchmaking Sundays in Chinese Parks – General

Video report on the Chinese parents who meet up in Shanghai parks to find partners for their children. Matchmakers trade love on the open market in this modern day take on arranged marriages.

Sometimes you realize that there are fundamental differences between Western and Chinese appreciations of "honesty". One of my favorite examples of these different approaches to truth-telling was when a Chinese friend of mine told me that his parents instructed him as a child not to be "too honest."

Shocked, I asked for clarification, "wait a minute, your parents TOLD you to lie?"

More than 750 parents who lost their only child in last year's Sichuan earthquake are now expecting a new child. "After the quake, the Sichuan provincial legislature passed a regulation stating that parents who lost an only child or whose children were disabled in the quake could have another.

The kidnapping and selling of children has been a problem in China for decades. After the implementation of China's one child policy, some parents began to worry that a single child might not be enough to care for them in their old age.

The offer: 6,000 yuan ($878) for five days. The reason: to present her before his parents in his hometown of Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, to stop them from pestering him to find a girlfriend and get married. Nearly 400 applicants have responded within three days, he says. "Many girls have contacted me and want to meet me."

They had what they thought was the perfect solution, but it turned out that the men are just too picky.

They think that Yu Xiaofei, with her cropped black hair and dark-rimmed glasses, looks too much like a tomboy, and they think that Jiang Yifei's distaste for children is suspicious.

One sad side effect of China's economic miracle: 23 million children under the age of five now live apart from both their parents, who have left home to find work in the country's cities, according to a newly released statistic.

"Now, that'll learn the little larcenist. In Pudong around 11:30am on Sunday, a couple from Anhui province tied up their 12-year-old son from a metal frame used for hanging clothes and used a whip to demonstrate traditional child-rearing techniques. The boy was being punished for stealing 300RMB from his parents, who work as electronic waste recyclers, to play video games.

As many as three million Chinese babies are hidden by their parents every year in order to get around the country’s one-child policy, a researcher has discovered.