The option for on-demand intimacy has gained popularity among China’s middle-income young women, who are often focused on careers with no immediate plans to marry and start a family. Shops selling virtual friends and partners can be found on Chinese messaging app WeChat (微信) or on an e-commerce site like Taobao.com (淘寶). Several virtual boyfriends told reporters that most of their customers are single women in their 20s with disposable income. Pursuing romance had not been available to many Chinese women in the past. Parents of the female children “raised them as sons,” said Roseann Lake, author of a book on China’s unmarried women, Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World’s Next Superpower.
