She was nothing like the other Web entrepreneurs I’ve come to know in China.

For one thing, the top ranks of Chinese technology are dominated by men.

Weird shows found on Chinese television have included a World’s-Strongest-Man-style show featuring teams of midgets; a game show that pitted families against one another in series of stunts that left the losers either inconsolably upset and bickering at one at the end of the show.

In September 2004, one television station held an e-lottery to determine the death toll in school siege tragedy in Beslan, Russia, which left hundreds of schoolchildren dead. which features fledgling entrepreneurs presenting ideas to a panels of judges that has included some of the best known names in Chinese business such as Jack Ma of .

In the past couple of years, whenever I have given a guest lecture to students of journalism on Chinese media, I have talked extensively about the show, usually to make two points.

First, Chinese media can be simultaneously spectacular and mundane, ideologically overbearing and extremely entertaining, and subservient and defiant of the Party-state.

I met Gong six years ago, after she received a master’s degree in journalism and entered the dating business.

It goes by the tagline “The Serious Dating Website.”Gong was in office attire: glasses, ponytail, no makeup, and a pink Adidas jacket with a ragged left cuff.

The young men and women before her were joining a staff of nearly five hundred.

So, as an academic teaching and researching on Chinese media, I find dating shows to be a good prism through which to talk about how globalisation and privatisation impact on the individual’s everyday life.

For the past few years, Chinese television has been inundated with dating shows, including Love Comes Knocking on the Door (Shandong Satellite Television) and Hunan Satellite Television’s Take Me Out.