The 5 Best Dating Sites in China (What I Learned)

Here is my quick list of the top five dating sites and apps in China. I’ll go into more detail in my reviews later in this article.

1. Jiayuan.com
2. ChinaLoveCupid.com
3. AsianDating.com
4. Bumble
5. Tantan.com

I have spent a considerable amount of time in China since my first trip there way back in 2008. I used to run an e-commerce business, and my product was manufactured in a factory in Dongguan, an industrial city about 30 miles south of Guangzhou.

Back in 2008, there were no popular dating sites or apps to speak of, so you had to meet women through traditional means. Since that time, however, online dating sites and dating apps have become really popular.

The best dating sites and apps in China (which I will discuss in detail in this post) will give you the best opportunity to find a significant other or a casual date in this country. Any site that did not make this list probably has poor membership quality, a difficult interface, or is too expensive, etc.

Dating in China (like everywhere else in the world) isn’t easy, but it can yield results especially if you take the time to learn a little Chinese. My two biggest frustrations were the large number of women who just wanted to practice their English but weren’t interested in going offline on an actual date and women who made it clear early on that they just wanted some money from me. To avoid these frustrations, I recommend you contact A LOT of women and treat dating in China as a numbers game.

If I had to do it all over again, I would book a flight to one of the larger cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, or Shenzen, and then book a hotel or reserve an apartment somewhere in the center of that city. This way, you will be virtually equidistant to multiple parts of the city, making dating a lot easier once those messages start coming in.

I’ll say this. If you are willing to put in the elbow grease and sweat that is required to succeed, you will be surprised what will happen. You need to have a heavy dose of patience and set aside a large amount of time in order to scan hundreds of profiles and send personalized messages to those people whose profiles appeal to you. I only started getting good leads when I treated dating like a part-time job.

Ok, without further ado, let’s get into the descriptions of the five dating sites and apps where I found the most success.

1. Jiayuan.com

Jiayuan.com is the largest online dating site in China, and should be the site you sign up for if you know how to read and speak basic Chinese (if you don’t know any Chinese, check out my #2 site below).

Jiayuan.com was founded in 2003 by Rose Gong, a journalism student at Fudan University in Shanghai. Not only is it the most popular dating site, it is one of the most popular websites on the entire Internet.

Jiayuan has 190 million members. Most profiles I came across were legitimate, but it is worth mentioning that Jiayuan used to have a reputation for inadvertently hosting a lot of scam-artists and fake profiles. While this doesn’t seem to be the problem it once was, just be wary of giving out personal information to people you meet online.

As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, you really need to know basic Chinese to get the most out of this site. I think if I knew Chinese at a proficient level, I would have had even more success. This is because every page on Jiayuan is an assault on the senses – it’s overwhelming. The Chinese characters certainly don’t help with this. Google translate only works on about 60% of the text (due to text in images), and the text that is translated is often super-imposed on other lines of text (due to formatting issues), or is simply incomprehensible.

I spent a lot of time translating the “translations” just to figure out what is going on with each page. And there are a lot of pages, because Jiayuan is packed with different features.

Nevertheless, Jiayuan has multiple ways to search and communicate with members, many games to play, a matchmaking service, guides, blogs, customer support, dating events, and even a page dedicated to financial advice.

With so many features and users, this is a great site. But unless you know some Chinese, it will be a difficult, potentially frustrating experience for you.

Sign up Process

Start with your gender, birthday, location, and marital status, and go on to fill in your basic information and choose a password and username. Finish by selecting three labels to describe yourself (e.g. workaholic, introverted, or the hilariously translated “fatty”) and writing a few words about yourself and your ideal match.

Later, you can further specify your interests, ideal match requirements, lifestyle choices, and values.

How to Locate Potential Matches

Look through recommended profiles at the top of Jiayuan’s homepage or create your own search, filtered by all the basic information you’ve specified for your own profile. You can also see who has visited you, liked you, or followed you recently.

You have a few more search options at your disposal:

• Face Search – search for photos similar to one you choose from a sample list, or including specific traits, like a high nose, dimples, or “eyes”. I personally love women with eyes!
• Map Search – you are shown a map with the precise location of each member
• Match Personality Quiz – answer questions to match with other users, OkCupid style

How to Communicate with Other Members

With basic communication features, you can send messages, “poke” members, send virtual gifts, and “follow” profiles. You can also participate in:

• First Impression – You’re shown a random profile and given a list of tags to choose to describe the profile (pure and lovely, quirky, sexy style, etc.). Your choice will be sent to the user.
• Circle Fate – Post a personal ad of sorts, sorted by different categories (love line, blind date, mate, marriage, etc.)

Unique Site Features

Jiayuan has the most in-depth profile authentication features I’ve ever seen. You have the option of verifying your profile by phone, email, identity (actual name and ID number), Zhima Credit account (a 3^rd party website), property documents, video certification, academic certificates, and even divorce documents!

What is Included in Each Membership Level

• Standard – Create profile, browse, search and view other profiles
• VIP – See who has visited, liked or followed you, recover accidentally deleted messages, read message notifications, save searches, upload more photos, view profiles that have recently logged-in, blacklist other members, set photo passwords, higher member ratings for your profile
• Diamond – Read messages, free messaging, online chat
• Deluxe Edition Diamond Member – extra site credit, enhanced subscription options

2. ChinaLoveCupid.com

If you are an English speaker and don’t know Chinese, I recommend you check out ChinaLoveCupid instead of Jiayuan.com.

ChinaLoveCupid.com is run by one of my most favorite online dating companies, Cupid Media. Cupid Media owns sites that I’ve used in the past like Afrointroductions.com and Brazilcupid.com (this is the site I met my wife on).

The general site layout, interface, and available features is the same as the other Cupid Media dating sites, which is a plus.

The website sports a clean design and is easy to navigate. ChinaLoveCupid is an established site for those looking to meet and make matches with Chinese singles. With around 40,000 members, it is not the biggest site operating in this niche, but if you can sign up for a premium account, you’ll get a solid set of communication features and strong anti-spam protection that make this a site worth your time.

What I liked most about it is the design of the site. It doesn’t scream boredom and the profiles are very enhanced and detailed, making it more intriguing and exciting. It’s all about your interests.

If you are into Chinese or Asian men or women, give it a shot. You get a lot of features for free early on in the process so you can give it a test drive to see if you like it.

Sign up Process

Signing up is no hassle at all on ChinaLoveCupid. It’s about a 15-minute process that takes you through the normal stages of an online dating intro. It asks for your name, your headline, your height, occupation, interests and all that fun stuff.

You can also fill out a short questionnaire on what you are looking for in your companion. This will help match you up better with someone.

Once you’ve uploaded your one photo, it will take a little while for your photo to go on display as you will go under a verification process to make sure you are the real deal. After you are approved, you can go ahead and upload more photos. It can be a pain, though, as sometimes verification takes a bit of time.

How to Locate Potential Matches

Browsing for matches is highly adaptable to your style, thanks to four display options (Photo View, Basic View, Detail View and Profile) and four order options (Newest Members, Photos First, Last Active, and Relevance). Detailed, custom searches are also made possible with plenty of criteria to choose from: the option of saving your searches for future use, and further options to search by keyword, CupidTag, and first name.

I like that you can also piggyback on Popular Searches, such as New Members and Most Popular.

One neat thing is you can create tags which display your interests and then click on another members’ tags if they have similar interests. You can view other profiles for free and send them “likes” to let them know you are interested in them.

How to Communicate with Other Members

ChinaLoveCupid’s basic messaging feature for Standard members is a no frills affair, with more exciting and useful options available as perks for Gold and Platinum paying members.

As a Standard member, you can communicate freely with premium members. You can like and favorite other Standard members, and send them messages, but the text of the message will be blurred out. If they want to read it, one of you will have to upgrade to premium.

Once a premium member, audio, video and IM chat becomes available. Chatting live with another member is the best way to ensure the two of you are a good match.

Unique Site Features

Two of my favorite unique, useful features of ChinaLoveCupid are:

1. Message filtering: set filters on who you want to receive messages from, based on age, location, nationality, religion, ethnicity, smoking/drinking habits, and whether or not they have children.
2. Message translation: translate your messages into your target language with just one click. This feature isn’t perfect obviously (even Google hasn’t fully figured it out), but it is still extremely helpful. Language is no longer a barrier to finding that perfect match.

ChinaLoveCupid does offer a chatroom for its members, so you can discuss different topics and find different matches using the chatroom feature.

Also, the audio and video messaging is something that is really neat to take advantage of as not all dating sites offer that option. You also have the ability to make tags and match up your interests with other users on the site. Plus, ChinaLoveCupid allows you to see your compatibility rating with other members.

What is Included in Each Membership Level

• Standard – Create profile, upload photos, browse recommended matches, search for matches, send interest to any member, communicate with Gold and Platinum members
• Gold – All of the above, plus: Communicate with all members, audio/video chat, Instant Messaging, ad-free browsing, anonymous browsing
• Platinum – All of the above, plus: Better ranking in searches, VIP profile highlighting, extra profile space, access to advanced matching algorithms, message translation, extended search capabilities.

3. AsianDating.com

Not a lot of people talk about AsianDating.com when it comes to China since ChinaLoveCupid.com (and the sister site HongKongCupid.com in Hong Kong) is run by the same brand and is more targeted towards China. Nevertheless, it is really a good third option and has a lot of members in China (and Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines too).

Like all of the sites on the Cupid Media network, AsianDating has a well-designed, easy-to-use website. Sign-up is free, but the free membership doesn’t let you do much. AsianDating does have a number of great features for its premium members however.

My biggest complaint with the site was receiving many spammy messages quickly after signing up. However, there are plenty of real men and women genuinely looking to connect on this site, and the message filters are helpful in filtering out the scam-artists.

Sign up Process

Signing up for AsianDating takes two minutes tops, and keeps your wallet in your pocket. Registration is free and will only take a couple of minutes.

You can sign up with a unique account, or link your Facebook. Upload a profile photo now or later – you decide. The signup process is easy, and so is making a profile. If you want to go ahead and get more in-depth, the profile process can be much more intense and offer a deeper experience for you.

How to Locate Potential Matches

You have two paths to take when match-hunting: browsing and searching. When browsing through these matches, you can move quickly or slowly, looking at photos only or full profiles, one-by-one. The search feature allows you to craft a search for profiles matching specific criteria, such as age, location, education, body type, ethnicity, lifestyle choices (smoking, drinking, etc.), marital status, religion, and even their zodiac sign. You can also save these custom searches for future use.

How to Communicate with Other Members

If you’re sincere in your desire to connect with other members, and potentially meet and date them in real life, I strongly suggest you take the initiative and upgrade to Gold or Platinum. Until you do, you’ll be stuck with the few options basic messaging gives you: visiting profiles, “showing interest”, adding profiles to your list of Favorites, and sending messages (that can only be read if one of you is a premium member).

These options are fine for initiating conversation, but not much else. Once you’ve upgraded, you can message anyone you like, and they will be able to read your messages and reply as well. Audio, video, and IM chat options are also available.

Unique Site Features

A unique and powerful feature of AsianDating is the message translation. With this feature, you can translate your messages into the language of your choice with one simple click. With this tool, the language barrier is turned from a mighty stone wall to a short picket fence.

Like most language translators, there will be some errors in grammar. Heck, even Google’s translator isn’t perfect. But using this tool will help you introduce yourself to members whom before would have understood nothing. This feature is available for Platinum members only.

One other feature I like on AsianDating is the approval process which helps make sure that your identity and photos are real. All uploaded pictures go through a review process to be approved before posting. This helps cut down on annoying fakes. Also, overall, the app is easy-to use (with a down-scrolling method of browsing), and available free on the Google Play Store.

What is Included in Each Membership Level

• Standard – Sign up, fill out profile, upload photos, customize searches, send interest to other profiles, communicate with Gold and Platinum members
• Gold – All of the above, plus: Unlimited messaging and communication with other profiles (text, audio, video, Instant Messaging), ad-free browsing, invisible browsing
• Platinum – All of the above, plus: Rank above other members in searches, doubled profile space, VIP profile highlighting, platinum-exclusive search features, advanced matching algorithms, message translation

4. Bumble

Bumble is a dating app best known for having women make the first move. One disadvantage of many dating apps is that society expects men to make the first move, and women’s inboxes tend to be flooded with unwanted messages. While some might not like that, others think it’s revolutionary—a man without a clever icebreaker or a woman who wants quality over quantity flocks to Bumble.

How to Sign Up

Initially, you had to use Facebook to create a Bumble profile. However, Bumble recently has allowed those who have a phone to sign up using text verification. Afterward, it’s all a manner of entering your profile information.

Understandably, some people might wish to use their email instead, thinking their phone number is too much information. However, using a phone ensures that there are fewer fake profiles.

How to Find Matches

Bumble recommends potential matches in a swipe left or right manner. However, Bumble uses reaction emojis you can use to react to a person. If the reactions match, you can start a conversation. In addition, women can also send a message, meaning they get the first move. For same-sex dating, both parties can message first.

Bumble also has a Super Swipe option, showing a user that you have more interest in them than others.

Communicating With Other Members

Bumble uses a basic messaging system. However, it does have a twist to it. Once you’ve matched or a person sends a message, you have 24 hours to respond. Otherwise, a conversation is expired unless you use a Bumble Boost. This feature can be inconvenient, particularly if you’ve been matched on a day when you’re busy, but it pressures you to make a move.

Unique Features

• Women make the first move.
• Emoji reactions ensure that both of you have a match
• A pressure-based messaging system where you need to respond fast

What Is Included In Every Membership Level

Like most dating apps, Bumble requires you to subscribe to a premium membership if you want to get the most out of it. Features include:

• More filters for better matches
• You can see who admires you
• You can change your location when traveling
• Undo any left swipes
• Extended match time
• Rematch with expired users
• Unlimited swipes and five Super Swipes weekly
• Your account is featured weekly

Personally, we feel that some features, such as undoing mistakes, should be in the free version. However, the premium does offer a decent deal.

5. Tantan.com

Tantan is the dating app that caters to millennials. According to Statista, Tantan is most popular in China where the app was developed.

Sign Up Process

Tantan has made it easy for users to sign up. All you need is a social media account. While you aren’t required to fill out every piece of information, Tantan does prioritize users with completed accounts.

Paid users can also have their profile validated to earn a verified badge, but the process can take up to 24 hours to get approval.

How to Locate Potential Matches

Tantan will generate your match suggestions immediately after completing the sign-up process and will appear under the “Explore” tab. The app combines a roulette-style matching algorithm and swipe interface for a smart yet familiar matching experience. Once a user that you’ve swiped right on also swipes right on you, you will “match,” and communication abilities will unlock.

How to Communicate with Other Members

After you’ve made a match, Tantan will open an array of communication options to get to know your potential partner. Tantan has the option to send mild or intimate Q&A quizzes to get to know your match on different levels according to your comfortability.

Unlike many dating apps though, Tantan gives users the ability to attach multimedia files such as videos or photos to their chats.

Unique App Features

Multimedia capabilities aren’t the only thing that makes Tantan unique. Tantan has a variety of other features that make using the app a fun experience.

• Super likes – Let your match know that you are especially interested in them by sending a super like.
• Exact location sharing — Out and about and want some company? You can send your exact location to matches in chat.
• Quizzes — Running out of conversation starters? Send your match a get-to-know-you quiz and use the answers as your guide.
• Moments — Similar to a social media post or status update, you can capture a snippet of your day as a photo or video and post it to Tantan for only your matches to see.
• Rewind — Accidentally swipe left? You can use the rewind feature to go back and swipe right.

What is Included in Each Membership Level

Single millennials interested in testing out the app can do so at no charge — Tantan has a free version that allows for limited liking, matching, and chatting. But if you fall in love with the app and have to have more, you can upgrade to Tantan Premium. Here’s what’s included:

• Unlimited swipes
• Unlimited rewinds
• 5 Super likes per day
• Validated profile badge
• Boosted profile
• Location abilities

Memberships can be purchased for different durations of time depending on how long you think you might need the app. If you’re not happy with your membership, you can request a partial refund within the first 30 days.

How to Get Started Dating in China

The first thing you’re going to want to do is to become a member of one of the dating sites/apps I discussed above. You’ll then want to make contact with A LOT of members….hundreds of members (yes, I said hundreds).

Dating is mostly a numbers game. You’ll need to plant lots of seeds and kiss lots of frogs until you find any kind of measurable success.

If you need help on how to set up a profile and what to write for your initial and follow up messages, check out my e-book, Online Dating Success: How to Find Love Anywhere in the World.

Good luck dating! Remember to be patient and don’t give up!

Further Reading

• Worldwide Online Dating Site Reviews: Be sure to check out my country-by-country reviews of the best online dating sites in the world.

• Worldwide Moving Guide: Everything you need to know in order to plan your move to 65+ countries around the world.

• Worldwide Jobs Guide: If you are interested in working in this country, be sure to check out my posts on how to find jobs in this country and other countries around the world.

• Worldwide Apartments Guide: If you are interested in renting an apartment in another country, take a look at my articles on how to find an apartment in various countries around the world.

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