During just two months, the buzzword “diaosi” has invaded China. Its essence, and hence its popularity, has to do with one particular problem in China:

The word diaosi was coined first by single, young men who feel they have dead-end lives. Generally, men in this category earn little, are not good looking, and have difficulty winning promotion. Unlike their upper-class contemporaries, they lack influential families, useful social networks for their careers, and most importantly, suitable women to marry.

“I’m just a diaosi; poor and plain-looking, who will marry me?” is a common sentiment uttered by many; half self-mockery, half reality. Many young men call themselves diaosi because they feel they are among the lowest echelons of society. They suffer low self-esteem and have stopped trying to improve their lives. (Emphasis added, Source)


There are several issues, but what young men want, what they want a promotion for, is women:

“The pressure of marriage intensifies anxiety among this group,” Ke discussed on Sohu.com. “Many of those young men claim to be diaosi, since they can’t find a proper woman to marry. It reflects a deep sense of loss.” Source


Foreigners in China are no longer the rare, intriguing alien. In university cities like Nanjing, numbers increased strongly, and especially the males have also become to be seen as a nuisance, as a competition that saps an already scarce resource: Females.


Western men with Chinese wives get to feel the hostility – she for picking a “foreign devil” although the Chinese population already has a strong male surplus, and he, how dare come here and steal “their” women? Patriotic Germans feel similar if they see a German woman with a Turkish boyfriend, but German women do not seem especially scarce, nor are Turks seen as undeservedly rich.  Chinese still largely think that foreigners are all rich, although by now, most are hardly middle class but still supposed to pay higher prices in many situations - social security and suchlike, automatically withheld from their salaries, will likely never be actually given to them.  Many people also think that money is all there is to "honey".

屌丝 = Diao (3) si (1) = (male organ) + (a thread like thing, a tiny bit)

Let me address this issue by first telling how it is and then giving some advice to the “diaosi” of the world, how you get a sweetheart to marry!

Chinese women are not a scarce resource!  There is an endless supply of Chinese women that are not wanted by Chinese men. Those women are “too old” (above 26) or “too tall” and other silly reasons.  Armies of educated women seek foreigners because they gave up finding Chinese.  Do foreigners give them money?  Some do and often regret the women they get that way, but most of these Chinese women have enough money, share all bills, and mainly want a trustworthy partner.

Dear Chinese men, if you feel the urge to blame, after blaming yourselves, blame your parents* for having preferred sons.  If you were a daughter, this most important issue would be easier for you in today’s China.  But guess what, many Chinese STILL TODAY, and that is really stupid, want sons. As if in this modern information technological, service oriented business world, a daughter cannot make money or find a husband easily (especially with the male surplus, or perhaps a foreigner), and so on, all the way to supporting the parents in old age.

I could offer more targets to blame that are neither foreigners nor the women who date them, but let us get to solutions.  Dear individual “diaosi”:  There are gazillions of Chinese women who crave a loving heart!  Two aspects you need to consider apart from the question of whether you have a loving heart (likely not if you hate foreigners and women who date them):

1)  You do not want to date the “BMW Lady” anyway! Let me explain:  Ma Nuo is a 22-year-old model from Beijing who appeared on China's most popular dating show, If You Are the One, famously exclaiming “I'd rather cry in a BMW car than laugh on the backseat of a bicycle”, after which the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) issued stricter rules for matchmaking programs in order to stop the further spread of money worship.  A large fraction of women is like Ma Nuo, but they will make you cry, regardless BMW or walking!

2)  I emphasized the quote “Many young men call themselves diaosi … They suffer low self-esteem and have stopped trying to improve their lives.  You may think that this is too easily said by somebody who you may think will never grasp the hopelessness of your situation; you may not grasp the deeper truth of this; but trust me: There is only one thing you need to change in order to almost automatically end up with a loving wife. The part about having given up to improve. She is waiting for you all over.  You are on the internet already, a few clicks away from her.  Toss the cigarettes and improve yourself, because she smells “has given up” a mile against the wind.

Don’t get me wrong: Western individualism teaches that everybody of billions must try to be unique, which makes billion’s of depressed consumers. Do not try to become extraordinary or “great” – that is all a ruse to further exploit your guarantied failure. Merely start to improve, then never stop to improve your heart, to find a little bit of something that grows you a little, and do it for *yourself*, never to impress her, say play a musical instrument, or organize a self-teaching meditation group, whatever, something that you enjoy and that increases your own self-worth, and if you do that from your heart, one day when you least expect it, there she is! Works like magic, is science though.

Is this advice wrong because it cannot work for all diaosi collectively given the surplus of men?  No, because more women are born every day and the waiting period for diaosi buffers it - diaosi are useful after all. But I will not explain population dynamics math here, because, dear individual diaosi, you don’t need to care about all diaosi.

And if you two then cannot resist the urge to increase overpopulation, make it a daughter for crying out loud! How is it that men supposedly rule the world but we still have not got two girls for every guy? Don’t worry about too many girls in Asia – your foreign friends can help you with that.

* Vanishing females is in almost all cultures a problem (e.g. see here, especially Lecture 1).  If the previous generation were responsible for my remaining sexually frustrated and lonely in order to ensure that they are somewhat better fed in old age, I would feed them a kick in the butt.