Picture this: You’re scrolling through a dating app. You see the usual information — their age, their job, maybe a line or two about their hobbies.

You check out their list of dealbreakers. The demands read: No siblings. No history of living with an ex. No history of soliciting prostitutes.

What sounds like a dystopian thought experiment is the daily reality on Chinese matchmaking platforms, where marriage is increasingly treated not as a pursuit of personal romance, but as a demographic crisis to be managed.

Lynette Lu is a PhD candidate in Digital Humanities at the University of Bern. Her work revolves around a painstaking critical discourse analysis of Chinese matchmaking culture. By manually analyzing thousands of online dating profiles, Lynette is uncovering the profound linguistic and sociological biases hiding in plain sight.

Martin Ritzmann sat down with Lynette to unpack the bleak realities of this highly curated marriage market.

Links:

• Lynette Lu on ResearchGate

Related Materials:

• Leta Hong Fincher, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, 10th Anniversary Edition. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

• CNA Insider, “How Matchmaking Agencies In China Are Helping Young Men Find Love,” YouTube video.

• Zhaorui Lü, “Navigating the Market for Love: The Chinese Party-State as Matchmaker in the Early Reform Era,” Made in China Journal, 24 March 2025.

Additional Voices by Jennifer Solenthaler, Heidi Mercki and Ueli Khan.

New episodes of WBKollektion on the first monday of each month!

Move beyond the classical pillars of the Western canon and discover how artists from the Global South are reshaping the art world today.

In this episode, Lea Hagmann sits down with Elize Mazadiego, Assistant Professor of World Art History at the University of Bern. Elize specializes in non-Western art histories, focusing heavily on experimental Latin American art from the 1950s to the 1980s. Together, they explore how creatives of this era departed from traditional mediums like painting and sculpture to embrace groundbreaking practices in performance, video, and postal art.

Links:

• Elize Mazadiego's profile on the University of Bern website

New episodes of WBKollektion on the first monday of each month!

It’s a blazing hot afternoon in late 2021. Moslem Ghomashlouyan is standing in a crisply air-conditioned sports apparel store in an upscale mall, looking at rows upon rows of Nikes, Adidas, and New Balances. Nothing unusual – except for one detail:
The mall was in Northern Tehran – And Iran has been under strict US-led sanctions for decades.

Martin Ritzmann sat down with the social anthropologist to learn more about the remarkable journey Western brand-name apparel undertake across the Iraqi-Iranian border.

NOTE: This episode was recorded on 27 March, 2026 – 4 weeks after the onset of the 2026 Iran war.

Links:

• Moslem Ghomashlouyan's profile on UniBE

Further Reading:

• Erami, Narges, and Arang Keshavarzian. 2015. “When Ties Don’t Bind: Smuggling Effects, Bazaars and Regulatory Regimes in Postrevolutionary Iran.” Economy and Society 44 (1): 110–139. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2014.909986

• Yıldız, Emrah. 2024a. “Guaranteed Contraband’: A Cultural Biography of Kaçak Tea in Gaziantep’s Iranian Bazaar.” Journal of Cultural Economy 17 (2): 178–196. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2024.2323691

• Zinati, Peyman. 2024. “Escaping isn’t for everyone”: Kurdish smugglers’ navigational tactics at checkpoints in Iran. Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)

• Bozçalı, Fırat. 2025. Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey’s Kurdish Borderlands. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

New episodes of WBKollektion on the first monday of each month!