HONG KONG - It is definitely not perfect, but the world's largest matchmaking website for the Chinese believes mathematical calculation is a good guide to pairing off couples.
For the rising number of single women in China who are well past their marriageable age but still looking for an ideal spouse, the Beijing-based www.zhenai.com is a beacon of hope with its brand of 'scientific matching'.
Using the mathematical knowledge he learnt at Cornell University, chief executive Li Song has come up with the perfect dress code for charming one's potential mate - from hairstyles to the shade of one's tights, the South China Morning Post said in a report yesterday.
And all this is retrievable from a database which the multimillionaire has painstakingly built up, the paper added.
Holding a doctorate in finance from Cornell, Dr Li worked as an investment banker in New York and then Hong Kong before returning to mainland China to apply quantitative finance to love.
He bought a free-dating site in 1998 and subsequently transformed it into an integrated Internet and call centre matchmaking service.
Zhenai.com, which means 'cherished love', is now the largest matchmaking site for the Chinese in the world, boasting 400 call centre matchmakers, 23 million registered members and a daily sign-up rate of 30,000.
Explaining why he goes for 'mathematical matchmaking', Dr Li said: 'Because my background is more mathematically inclined, and I don't have a (psychological) theory to begin with.' He added: 'What I do is based on statistical results, reverse engineering, and make it a learning process.'
He said: 'It's an iterative process, so you try to match people and then you study the profiles of the people who have dated successfully and put this back into your database.'
Dr Li believes there is much room for his company to grow as it fills 'the need for a convenient, online version of a traditional matchmaking agency' at a time when 'everyone devotes most of their time to their jobs' and has little time for spouse-hunting.
Besides, his female clientele is fast expanding as more 'triple high' women - those with high education, a high salary and a high job position - are being left high and dry as their male peers prefer lower earners.
It does not help that many of these women - meanly called 'Great Sage that Rivals Heaven' in China, a name referring to the Monkey King of Chinese legend as 'sage' sounds the same in Mandarin as 'leftover' - have high expectations of their Mr Right.
There are roughly half a million single women aged between 25 and 50 living in Beijing, with the number reaching a million in Shanghai, the newspaper reported yesterday.
Ironically, data also shows that there will be 30 million to 40 million more men of marriageable age than women by 2020, with one in every five men expected to have difficulty finding a wife.
The All-China Women's Federation released a survey last year showing that about 41 per cent of single women in China were worried they might not be able to find the right person to marry.
Only 8.1 per cent of single men felt the same way.
That probably explains why a higher proportion of women than men are paying Dr Li's website to meet up with their matched partners, although they are outnumbered by three to two in his database.
This article was first published in The Straits Times.
