News Desk
SHANGHAI — In a sleek, neon-lit apartment overlooking the restless sprawl of Shanghai, Mr. Liu, a 34-year-old office worker, sits alone, staring at a phone screen that once promised him love.
Over the past year, he poured nearly $28,000 into what he thought was a budding romance with a woman named Ms. Jiao—a painter, a dreamer, someone who filled the quiet corners of his life with video chats and tender messages. She needed money, she said, for a small business and to help a sick relative. He sent it willingly, all 200,000 yuan, trusting the intimacy they’d built pixel by pixel.
But Ms. Jiao never existed. She was a mirage, a collage of AI-generated videos and photos crafted by scammers who preyed on Liu’s longing. There were clips of her holding a paint palette, standing on a busy street, smiling softly—images so lifelike he never questioned them.
Fake IDs and medical bills sealed the illusion. Last week, Chinese state media broke the story: Liu had been duped, his savings gone, his “girlfriend” a digital ghost. The police are investigating, but the money—and Ms. Jiao—are unlikely to ever materialize.
Liu’s story isn’t just a cautionary tale about technology run amok. It’s a jagged shard of a bigger, bleaker picture in China, where the search for connection has become a hollow, mechanical grind, and where people like Liu—single, yearning, adrift—are easy marks in a society that feels increasingly unmoored from human warmth.
China today is a place where the gears of progress churn relentlessly, but the soul seems to have slipped out of the machine. Decades of the one-child policy, a skewed sex ratio, and a culture of grueling work have left millions of men—and women—without partners, without families, without the messy, vital chaos of love.
There are roughly 35 million more men than women here, a gap that’s turned marriage into a luxury good, brides into rarities. Rural bachelors languish, urban professionals like Liu swipe endlessly on dating apps, and everyone watches the birth rate plummet as procreation fades into an afterthought. The government frets over demographics, but the people feel the emptiness.
In this vacuum, life has taken on a robotic hum. Men and women eye each other with suspicion—scams like Liu’s only deepen the mistrust.
Is she real, or a bot? Is he a catch, or a con? Relationships, when they happen, often feel transactional, stripped of spontaneity.
Young people talk of “lying flat,” rejecting the grind, but also the gamble of romance. Marriage rates are tanking; last year, they hit a record low. The ones who still hope, like Liu, turn to the internet, where AI promises what reality can’t deliver: a perfect partner, scripted to care.
Liu isn’t alone in falling for the illusion. Scammers, armed with generative AI, are cashing in on China’s lonely hearts. The tools are cheap, the results uncanny—videos so smooth you’d swear she’s breathing. CCTV aired some of Ms. Jiao’s fakes: her brushing hair from her face, her voice soft and pleading. It’s a cruel twist—technology that could bridge distance instead widens the gulf, leaving victims not just broke but hollowed out, their trust in others shredded.
Talk to people here, and you hear the same refrain: Life feels like a checklist. Work, eat, sleep, repeat. The old rhythms—courting, marrying, raising kids—have been replaced by a sterile loop.
In Beijing, a 29-year-old woman named Zhang Wei tells she’s given up on dating. “Men want a wife who looks like an algorithm—pretty, quiet, obedient,” she says. “I want someone real, but they’re all scared off by my job, my age.”
In Henan, a farmer named Chen Bao, 41, shrugs when asked about marriage. “No women here,” he says. “They left for the cities. I talk to my pigs instead.”
The rise of AI scams only sharpens this sense of detachment. Meta warned about it earlier this month—fake romances bleeding people dry, globally—but in China, it lands harder.
Here, the emotional stakes feel existential. Liu didn’t just lose money; he lost a lifeline. “I thought she saw me,” he told a reporter, his voice cracking. “Now I don’t know what’s real.”
The government pushes campaigns to boost births, parades slogans about family, but it’s like shouting into a void. People aren’t just avoiding kids—they’re avoiding each other. Sexes drift apart, walled off by doubt and disappointment.
In Shanghai’s gleaming towers, in rural villages swallowed by dust, the same quiet despair settles in: a life without partners, without touch, where even the fakes feel more alive than the real thing.
Liu won’t get his money back. He might not try again. And China, for all its might, keeps rolling forward—efficient, cold, a machine humming along without a heartbeat.
