All the Sad Young Chinese Professionals
Earlier this year, one of the most popular apps in China was called Are You Dead?. This was not a game, but a handy way for the many young people who live alone across the country, mostly in cities, to keep tabs on one another. Users needed to check in with the app every 48 hours by pressing a big green button. If a user did not check in, the app promptly notified a designated contact. Designed as a source of comfort to those who worry about dying alone, the app became the top paid download for the iPhone in China in January.
Then it vanished. Apple said in a statement that China’s cyberspace watchdog ordered the company to remove it from its Chinese store. The app seemed to challenge the Communist Party’s insistence that the Chinese people are content beneficiaries of economic and social progress. Instead, Are You Dead? exposed the unease felt by many Chinese urbanites, and it highlighted the depths of a major social problem facing China today: loneliness. In suppressing the app, China’s authorities have made plain that they are watching the public mood and not liking what they see.
[From the February 2025 issue: The anti-social century]
In a country of 1.4 billion people, many of them crammed into densely packed cities, loneliness may seem like an unlikely concern. But China’s rapid economic progress and adoption of new technologies have transformed the country from an agrarian, family-based society to an urban, industrial one, and many young workers live far from the small villages and provincial towns where they grew up. The alienating pressures of city life—the overall urban population has swelled by about 400 million people over the past two decades—together with a culture that often encourages competition and status obsession has created a prevailing sense of uncertainty, insecurity, and isolation.
Newcomers to big cities anywhere feel lonely, but “the fact that Chinese people used to have much more traditional and much more tightly knit family structure is contributing to the feeling much more strongly,” Xuemei Bai, a professor who specializes in urbanization at the Australian National University, in Canberra, told me.
Hang Nan’s story is typical. Originally from the city of Linfen in Shanxi province in north China, the 29-year-old relocated to Beijing in 2021 for a job at an advertising agency. She hardly knew anyone in the capital when she arrived, and she has struggled to make friends ever since. Ten-hour days at work leave her little time or energy to socialize. “When you choose life in a big city, you’re choosing more possibilities and more opportunities,” Hang said. “But you also have to accept loneliness as part of the price.”
Hang tried finding friends by posting on the social-media platform Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, saying she was seeking people to join her for talks over coffee or walks in parks, which helped a bit. Last year she also began attending something called “blind-box dinners,” which involves paying a fee to dine among strangers. The Beijing-based entrepreneur Lu Ming organizes these evenings for groups of about six people, who then split the bill. Lu said he began planning the events in late 2024 and now arranges them regularly in big Chinese cities, including Shanghai and Guangzhou. People “feel isolated and they desperately want to break out of their own circles,” Lu said, “but they simply lack the channels and resources to do it.”
In many ways, the loneliness problem in China looks like the loneliness problem everywhere else. Going out in pricey Beijing or Shanghai can quickly pinch tight budgets, especially for young people on starting salaries. The sagging economy and sluggish job market has made nearly everyone more cautious about spending. Social media has also changed how people interact, creating a semblance of connection and relationships in the absence of actual connecting. After a long day at work, many Chinese are perfectly happy to gaze at their phone on their couch, but then wonder why they sometimes feel desolate.
One Shanghai resident, who asked to be identified by his online persona A Ze, told The Atlantic that, beyond occasional after-work outings with colleagues, he rarely meets people socially. He can’t afford many nights out on the $1,000 he earns monthly as a warehouse manager for a sportswear store, after paying rent and sending a portion to family back in his hometown. So he spends much of his free time on his phone at home instead. “In real life, relationships only become interesting when they reach a certain level where you can really communicate,” A Ze said. “Being online is better, because you can speak freely and there’s less pressure.” He does, however, admit to bouts of loneliness.
A Ze is not alone in shying away from intimacy in China. Overwhelmed by work and the pressure to succeed, many young people seem wary of taking on additional burdens, emotional and otherwise. A 2023 online survey by the networking app Soul found that nearly 60 percent of respondents said they had no more than two close friends. Many young people are finding ways to alleviate their loneliness through superficial and temporary relationships. One solution that has emerged in recent years is something called a dazi, a no-strings companion for various activities, such as playing video games and going to the gym. In a dazi relationship, there are no expectations that the person will turn into a true, long-term friend.
[From the May 2014 issue: A Chekhov from China]
Yadan, a 23-year-old who asked to be identified by her given name, moved to Beijing two years ago for a job in finance. She said that seeking new friends beyond her limited social circle is “exhausting,” so she sometimes posts requests for a dazi on RedNote. A dazi is “free from the expectations that come with a regular friend or a partner,” she said.
The rise of dazi culture makes sense in a country where finding a romantic partner feels out of reach for many. Chinese women tend to prefer partners with higher education, income, and social status, and they can afford to be picky. The Communist Party’s policies to contain population growth, which restricted most couples to a single child for 35 years, contributed to a skewed balance in which men well outnumber women—largely because families were quicker to abort girls. This has condemned many men to solitude. “Large numbers of lower-income or lower-status Chinese men feel that they want a relationship but simply can’t find one,” Zheng Ying, the brand director of Taqu, a Chinese dating app with 200 million registered users, told The Atlantic.
Another inhibition to intimacy in China may be the way social interactions tend to be motivated by a transactional pragmatism. “There is a very strong emphasis on payoff,” Zheng said. “People are constantly encouraged to think in terms of returns: What am I going to get out of this? But loneliness or companionship isn’t really something that can be measured in purely numerical or visible terms.”The costs of marriage can also be prohibitively high, especially for young people not yet established in their career. Some families still expect men to buy a home and car ahead of marriage, which renders quite a few suitors ineligible in China’s big cities, even as property prices have slumped. And with the country’s economic outlook looking more uncertain, owing to deflation, trade tensions, and the looming threat of AI, couples have become even more reluctant to commit. In 2010, 22 million people in China got married for the first time; in 2024, only 9.2 million did.
“Before, people just thought that they had a good future—the economy, everything was good—so they had the confidence to get married,” Fuxian Yi, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies China’s demographic trends, told me. “But right now they are very pessimistic about the future, so they are scared to get married and have children.”
Yet marriage is no panacea for loneliness. Lionel, who asked to be identified only by his first name, grew up in a small town in the southern province of Guizhou, and now works as a video-game developer in the eastern tech hub of Hangzhou, where he lives with his wife. But he admitted that regular bouts of loneliness still often reduce him to tears. He attributed these feelings to his sense of insecurity in an economy in which professional success determines social status. “Conversation often turns to income prospects, to assumptions about future earnings,” Lionel said. This makes him reluctant to socialize, because he feels that he’s being judged. “In the past, being a programmer at a big firm was a glory,” he said. “But now, with layoffs and AI, your social identity can collapse so easily.” His fear of being perceived as a failure has made him cut off “links with others to avoid the pain when that identity eventually breaks,” he said. Lionel is so ashamed of these feelings that he doesn’t share them even with his wife.
Some Chinese people find it easier to simply pay for companionship. Salome, as she calls herself in English, is a 30-year-old who works as an English translator for a trading company in Beijing. On the side, she is a cosplayer, or “coser,” who dresses up as male characters from anime, manga, and video games, then hires herself out for private meetings for about $35 an hour. Her clients are mostly women in their 20s who hope to chat with a favorite character and in some cases practice their English. Some prospective clients plainly hope to engage in romantic role-play, which Salome tries to avoid because it makes her uncomfortable. But she understands the impulse, suggesting that these meetings are safer substitutes for more complicated—and often disappointing—relationships with actual men. These women are “very resistant to real-life men, and very unwilling to let real men enter their fantasy space,” she said.
[Faith Hill: The bots that women use in a world of unsatisfying men]
In this way, China’s young professionals resemble their similarly isolated, commitment-phobic peers in other developed countries. Perhaps widespread feelings of loneliness can therefore be seen as a sign and price of progress—but one that the Chinese people may wonder about paying. This is why the Communist Party saw the Are You Dead? app as such a threat. The party’s implicit promise to the Chinese people in recent decades has been that as long as they give up their rights, they will be rewarded with prosperity. If citizens are learning that this wealth is, in fact, a mixed bag—mentally, socially, even economically—then this bargain doesn’t work.
Cao Li in Hong Kong contributed reporting to this story.