December 29, 2025 • 15 mins
Doctor Wendy Walsh talks to film director Violet Feng about her documentary, The Dating Game. The film explores the social issue of an oversupply of men in China due to the one-child policy. Violet shares her personal connection to the topic, having made films about China for years, and how she wanted to understand the perspectives of Chinese men. They discuss the emotional impact of the policy on the men, including attachment trauma and low self-esteem, and how this affects their ability to form relationships.
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Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to KF
I Am six forty the Doctor Wendy Waalsh Show on
demand on the iHeartRadio app. Oh my gosh, I watched
this movie. Thank goodness. The director sent me a screener
that literally is everything I've been saying for years and
(00:21):
over supply of men in China. I keep talking about
the oversupply of successful women here in America. Violet, welcome
to the show. Tell me how to pronounce your last
name correctly.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Phung at emg song fong.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Violet, Oh my goodness, this documentary is so interesting. So
it's called The Dating Game correct, Yes, yeah, And the
Dating Game looks at the social problem of an oversupply
of men in China because of the years of the
(00:58):
one child law. And I got to tell you a
couple of things that I liked about it. One, it's
really interesting, like a fun dating show because you meet
a Chinese dating coach who's cleaning up these guys and
giving them all these techniques. So it's sort of fun
and entertaining, but to get into some of the social
stuff and some real emotion. So, Violet, how did you
(01:21):
come up with the idea for doing the dating game.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Well, so I've been making films about China for many
years and I'm born raising China. My last film was
actually about a film about women in China, and there's
a story about modern generation of women and how they
are trying to revive and ancient language created and shared
(01:45):
only among women, using that language to cope with the
revived patriarchal society in China. And after making that film,
understanding how extremely goin to divide it our country has become,
and also globally, I felt like it's my responsibility to
(02:06):
cross the aisle and really try to understand men's perspectives.
And without doing so, I don't think that I will
be able to challenge myself to really understand where the
gap of gender di vitually exist. So that was kind
of why that I was. I knew that I had
to make a film about Chinese men, and you hit
(02:28):
a letter.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
You really caught the experience. I think there will be
many young men in America who resonate with these men
because you really captured their emotional experience of loss, the
guys who are losing out. Now in the movie, you
say there are thirty million more extra basically Chinese men
(02:50):
than women, and the ones who are losing out tend
to be the ones who are in the less affluent areas,
in the rural villages. And in the movie, the social experiment,
of course is to bring them into the city, clean
them up, get them in fashion, and teach them how
to use those dating apps, et cetera. But you know,
while that's an interesting watch for viewers, there's a very
(03:13):
sad truth.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Behind this, right yeah. And it's not really only because
of the one child policy that most of the people
in the western countries know about, but these surplus men
also grew up in a time when China was experiencing
a rap economic boom, and that's also in the same
(03:36):
timeline as the urbanization of China that was happening. So
most of their parents answered the calling and then moved
to the city to provide better financial support for the family.
As a result, and also couple with another policy, which
is the residency policy, which prevented their children to move
(03:58):
wisdom to the city to got educated in the city.
So that's why most of their children are left behind
in the rural areas as a result, that not only
these young men grew up without any interaction to growth
because most of the people who the kids who were
(04:19):
born was boys versus growth. But also they grew up
without role models of relationships. They also grew up without love. Well,
it's that typical tragic.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
It's two layers of that. So you mentioned their parents
having to leave them because they had to search for
jobs in the city. They were not able to take
their kids with them. There's an interview with a mom
there who feels very sad that she left her son
when he was five.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Yeah, and you know, I see that.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
So I wrote my dissertation on attachment theory, and I
see that as attachment trauma. So it's twofold. It's one
the crisis of breaking the maternal bond and secondly, the
lack of modeling of love. Right now, many of them
were raised by grandparents, might have been a single grandparent
(05:12):
or a married grandparent. Did any of those grandparents do
you think could they model a healthy relationship or Well?
Speaker 2 (05:19):
The thing is that these grandparents, first of all, they
are much older. And also you have to remember that
it's usually the case that one that of grandparents are watching,
you know, like a lot of kids or cousins, you know,
so it's very hard for them to really provide enough
emotional support for all these kids. It's like it's probably
(05:42):
struggling enough for them to provide food for them, you know,
for example. So yeah, that's that's actually what most of
these kids were dealing with.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
And going back to the one child world, which how
many years was that in effect?
Speaker 2 (06:00):
So it started around nineteen seventy seven, seventy eight, so
he ended twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Wow, that's a huge period of time. And I remember
this sad moment in the movie when the boy talks
about when he was little, they you know, here they
are yearning for girls to talk to them, yearning to
meet girls, and he's reminiscing in a sad, sad way
about female fetuses, female babies he saw abandoned and stranded.
(06:34):
It is shocking to think that here was this trauma
that they were witnessing as children as well.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Yeah, and I think that for this generation of men,
they also because they see it with their own eyes,
and also they understood that or their mom's generation, their grandparents'
generation as women were treated onequally in a lot of ways.
So they actually do understand why women especially the younger
(07:03):
generation is going through explosion of face of rebellion and
so and then they are the consequence of that too.
And then they on one side they understand why this happened.
On the other side, they're the victims of that as well.
So there's many layers to these traumas that's causing for
(07:26):
these men, which is quite real. And I, you know,
were Reais in China. I knew all these numbers, and
I know all the facts, but it was truly until
when I was spending time with then them in such
an intense, intense way that I truly understand their psychological trauma.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
The thing that got me the most was how, you know,
relatively good looking all these guys were, and they felt
so ugly. They felt they had such low self esteem.
They seem to have the lowest self worth, and you know,
it reminded me. We have to go to a break,
but when we come back, I want to talk more
about this. What dating apps have created in this country
(08:09):
is women flock to a very small percentage of men
presented to them on the apps because they think they
can access these high status men, and then this other
chunk of men aren't getting any matches at all, and
it has nothing to do with the one child policy.
It just has to do with the algorithms of the
dating apps. You're listening to doctor Wendy Walsh on demand
(08:32):
from KFI AM six forty my guest, Violet Fun, film
director of the new documentary called The Dating Game, which
you will be able to stream online in the new year.
For now, you can see an expert an excerpt called
Only the Lonely a short version, and that's where I
discovered it first at the New York Times. So if
(08:53):
you just google the words New York Times and Only
the Lonely, you'll be able to see it.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Violet.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
The movie talks about this surplus of single men in
China because partly because of the one child law, but
also the fact that they're having trouble finding mates because
of the attachment trauma they had as kids when their
parents left to the city and become urbanized. Now, the
research that I've read in the area of evolutionary psychology
(09:20):
is that when any society or culture has a surplus
of single men who cannot find mates, that can raise
crime rates?
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Can it? Yeah? Absolutely so. I think that one thing
that we started to notice in China, is that the
last few years in particularly that you're seeing a lot
of phases of violence that like random happen of, like
(09:52):
people attacking like otters in big numbers on the street
in a mass. And over the past couple of years,
you see that a lot of these people who committed
those violence crimes are single, unmarried men. So that's one
thing that we've already started to see kind of the
(10:15):
anger and the dissatisfaction of these men, not only because
they cannot find love, but I think it's also because
we're experiencing economic downturn as well. So a lot of
these men are unemployed and they truly don't see hope
in their life.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
It can be a dangerous mixture high testosterone, not a
fully developed prefrontal cortex, anger and frustration about not finding
a mate. I noticed you touched on. The other thing
that societies and cultures have done around the world with
their surplus of young angrymen is the military has really expanded.
(10:58):
Can you talk about that a bit.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah, So that's you know, for these men, imagine that
they their job opportunities becoming dramatically limited, and there's so
much pressure for them just to survive from day to day.
So one of the options for them obviously is, you know,
join the military, although the bar for joining the military
(11:23):
internet is becoming higher and higher that they're actually demanding
more educated people to join the military. But for these people,
join the military is one of the options that they
can change their social status. And that's also interesting because
a lot of the Chinese women actually likes men who
(11:46):
from the military too, so that not only will potentially
solve there's a survival issue, but also that it makes
them more felt.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
It will help them find me. There's actually research to
support that. There's a famous study that in the UK
where they just looked at dating app profiles and looked
if if a man had had any military experience, he
was more likely to get a swipe right, even if
he was an accountant in the back office and never
saw a war zone. It's one way that you know,
(12:16):
historically men have competed against other men for female mates
is display of prowess and strength and fighting right in
the movie. Also the dating game, there were both informal
marketplaces as well as government run speed dating if you will,
(12:37):
and sometimes with parents just showing up trying to find
a mate. Can you explain that.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yeah, so, because, as you can see, one thing is
because of the gender and balance that we're having, but
also it's because the rise of feminism movement in China
and also in general, I think that's happening everywhere in
the world. Is a younger generation, just like the less
and less find out marriage of healings. So the birth
rate in China has vummitted over the past several years
(13:06):
and to a degree that you know, it really affected
the real estate market and everything, but it's also affected
economy in a great way, and in the forthcoming that
we're only predicting that it's also going to be continued
to be affected by the birth rate. Job So the
government i think is very concerned about that. So as
(13:27):
a result, they are hosting nationwide matchmaking events to encourage
people to get married. Not that they're really saying it
that getting married is a must have experience for every
human being, and it's also kind of your young generation's
(13:48):
responsibility because getting married is a way to fulfill a
harmonious society of China. So they really want to encourage
people to get married and have kids.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
And and the scene in the movie where there's sort
of a government run speed dating going on and they
match up a firefighter, a young man with a woman
and he very awkwardly hands her roses, she awkwardly. They're
telling them now touch, hold hands, now, hug And it
was heartbreaking to see these two young people who literally
(14:22):
didn't know what to do with each other.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Yeah, I mean absolutely. And you also see their you know,
the government's side that they're a desperation of wanting these
people just go home and get married in and make baby. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
They literally said that I hope you can go get
married now. This is tell her you love her, Tell
you love her. Were just like they've never seen each
other before. This is wild.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Well.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
I highly recommend this film to everybody. I can't wait
to see it streaming in the new year. For now,
if you want to see an excerpt, there's a wonderful
short version of it on the New York Times called
Only the Lonely. The long form, which we will see soon,
is called The Dating Game. Director Violet fun Violet, thanks
so much for being here on KFI.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
And that brings the Doctor Wendy Wall Show to a close.
It's always my pleasure to be with you every Sunday
from seven to nine pm. You can also follow me
on my social media which is at doctor Wendy Walsh.
You've been listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh. You can always
hear us live on KFI Am six forty from seven
to nine pm on Sunday and anytime on demand on
(15:28):
the iHeartRadio app
This is Doctor Wendy Walsh and you're listening to KF
I Am six forty the Doctor Wendy Waalsh Show on
demand on the iHeartRadio app. Oh my gosh, I watched
this movie. Thank goodness. The director sent me a screener
that literally is everything I've been saying for years and
(00:21):
over supply of men in China. I keep talking about
the oversupply of successful women here in America. Violet, welcome
to the show. Tell me how to pronounce your last
name correctly.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Phung at emg song fong.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Violet, Oh my goodness, this documentary is so interesting. So
it's called The Dating Game correct, Yes, yeah, And the
Dating Game looks at the social problem of an oversupply
of men in China because of the years of the
(00:58):
one child law. And I got to tell you a
couple of things that I liked about it. One, it's
really interesting, like a fun dating show because you meet
a Chinese dating coach who's cleaning up these guys and
giving them all these techniques. So it's sort of fun
and entertaining, but to get into some of the social
stuff and some real emotion. So, Violet, how did you
(01:21):
come up with the idea for doing the dating game.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Well, so I've been making films about China for many
years and I'm born raising China. My last film was
actually about a film about women in China, and there's
a story about modern generation of women and how they
are trying to revive and ancient language created and shared
(01:45):
only among women, using that language to cope with the
revived patriarchal society in China. And after making that film,
understanding how extremely goin to divide it our country has become,
and also globally, I felt like it's my responsibility to
(02:06):
cross the aisle and really try to understand men's perspectives.
And without doing so, I don't think that I will
be able to challenge myself to really understand where the
gap of gender di vitually exist. So that was kind
of why that I was. I knew that I had
to make a film about Chinese men, and you hit
(02:28):
a letter.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
You really caught the experience. I think there will be
many young men in America who resonate with these men
because you really captured their emotional experience of loss, the
guys who are losing out. Now in the movie, you
say there are thirty million more extra basically Chinese men
(02:50):
than women, and the ones who are losing out tend
to be the ones who are in the less affluent areas,
in the rural villages. And in the movie, the social experiment,
of course is to bring them into the city, clean
them up, get them in fashion, and teach them how
to use those dating apps, et cetera. But you know,
while that's an interesting watch for viewers, there's a very
(03:13):
sad truth.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Behind this, right yeah. And it's not really only because
of the one child policy that most of the people
in the western countries know about, but these surplus men
also grew up in a time when China was experiencing
a rap economic boom, and that's also in the same
(03:36):
timeline as the urbanization of China that was happening. So
most of their parents answered the calling and then moved
to the city to provide better financial support for the family.
As a result, and also couple with another policy, which
is the residency policy, which prevented their children to move
(03:58):
wisdom to the city to got educated in the city.
So that's why most of their children are left behind
in the rural areas as a result, that not only
these young men grew up without any interaction to growth
because most of the people who the kids who were
(04:19):
born was boys versus growth. But also they grew up
without role models of relationships. They also grew up without love. Well,
it's that typical tragic.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
It's two layers of that. So you mentioned their parents
having to leave them because they had to search for
jobs in the city. They were not able to take
their kids with them. There's an interview with a mom
there who feels very sad that she left her son
when he was five.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Yeah, and you know, I see that.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
So I wrote my dissertation on attachment theory, and I
see that as attachment trauma. So it's twofold. It's one
the crisis of breaking the maternal bond and secondly, the
lack of modeling of love. Right now, many of them
were raised by grandparents, might have been a single grandparent
(05:12):
or a married grandparent. Did any of those grandparents do
you think could they model a healthy relationship or Well?
Speaker 2 (05:19):
The thing is that these grandparents, first of all, they
are much older. And also you have to remember that
it's usually the case that one that of grandparents are watching,
you know, like a lot of kids or cousins, you know,
so it's very hard for them to really provide enough
emotional support for all these kids. It's like it's probably
(05:42):
struggling enough for them to provide food for them, you know,
for example. So yeah, that's that's actually what most of
these kids were dealing with.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
And going back to the one child world, which how
many years was that in effect?
Speaker 2 (06:00):
So it started around nineteen seventy seven, seventy eight, so
he ended twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Wow, that's a huge period of time. And I remember
this sad moment in the movie when the boy talks
about when he was little, they you know, here they
are yearning for girls to talk to them, yearning to
meet girls, and he's reminiscing in a sad, sad way
about female fetuses, female babies he saw abandoned and stranded.
(06:34):
It is shocking to think that here was this trauma
that they were witnessing as children as well.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Yeah, and I think that for this generation of men,
they also because they see it with their own eyes,
and also they understood that or their mom's generation, their grandparents'
generation as women were treated onequally in a lot of ways.
So they actually do understand why women especially the younger
(07:03):
generation is going through explosion of face of rebellion and
so and then they are the consequence of that too.
And then they on one side they understand why this happened.
On the other side, they're the victims of that as well.
So there's many layers to these traumas that's causing for
(07:26):
these men, which is quite real. And I, you know,
were Reais in China. I knew all these numbers, and
I know all the facts, but it was truly until
when I was spending time with then them in such
an intense, intense way that I truly understand their psychological trauma.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
The thing that got me the most was how, you know,
relatively good looking all these guys were, and they felt
so ugly. They felt they had such low self esteem.
They seem to have the lowest self worth, and you know,
it reminded me. We have to go to a break,
but when we come back, I want to talk more
about this. What dating apps have created in this country
(08:09):
is women flock to a very small percentage of men
presented to them on the apps because they think they
can access these high status men, and then this other
chunk of men aren't getting any matches at all, and
it has nothing to do with the one child policy.
It just has to do with the algorithms of the
dating apps. You're listening to doctor Wendy Walsh on demand
(08:32):
from KFI AM six forty my guest, Violet Fun, film
director of the new documentary called The Dating Game, which
you will be able to stream online in the new year.
For now, you can see an expert an excerpt called
Only the Lonely a short version, and that's where I
discovered it first at the New York Times. So if
(08:53):
you just google the words New York Times and Only
the Lonely, you'll be able to see it.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Violet.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
The movie talks about this surplus of single men in
China because partly because of the one child law, but
also the fact that they're having trouble finding mates because
of the attachment trauma they had as kids when their
parents left to the city and become urbanized. Now, the
research that I've read in the area of evolutionary psychology
(09:20):
is that when any society or culture has a surplus
of single men who cannot find mates, that can raise
crime rates?
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Can it? Yeah? Absolutely so. I think that one thing
that we started to notice in China, is that the
last few years in particularly that you're seeing a lot
of phases of violence that like random happen of, like
(09:52):
people attacking like otters in big numbers on the street
in a mass. And over the past couple of years,
you see that a lot of these people who committed
those violence crimes are single, unmarried men. So that's one
thing that we've already started to see kind of the
(10:15):
anger and the dissatisfaction of these men, not only because
they cannot find love, but I think it's also because
we're experiencing economic downturn as well. So a lot of
these men are unemployed and they truly don't see hope
in their life.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
It can be a dangerous mixture high testosterone, not a
fully developed prefrontal cortex, anger and frustration about not finding
a mate. I noticed you touched on. The other thing
that societies and cultures have done around the world with
their surplus of young angrymen is the military has really expanded.
(10:58):
Can you talk about that a bit.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Yeah, So that's you know, for these men, imagine that
they their job opportunities becoming dramatically limited, and there's so
much pressure for them just to survive from day to day.
So one of the options for them obviously is, you know,
join the military, although the bar for joining the military
(11:23):
internet is becoming higher and higher that they're actually demanding
more educated people to join the military. But for these people,
join the military is one of the options that they
can change their social status. And that's also interesting because
a lot of the Chinese women actually likes men who
(11:46):
from the military too, so that not only will potentially
solve there's a survival issue, but also that it makes
them more felt.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
It will help them find me. There's actually research to
support that. There's a famous study that in the UK
where they just looked at dating app profiles and looked
if if a man had had any military experience, he
was more likely to get a swipe right, even if
he was an accountant in the back office and never
saw a war zone. It's one way that you know,
(12:16):
historically men have competed against other men for female mates
is display of prowess and strength and fighting right in
the movie. Also the dating game, there were both informal
marketplaces as well as government run speed dating if you will,
(12:37):
and sometimes with parents just showing up trying to find
a mate. Can you explain that.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yeah, so, because, as you can see, one thing is
because of the gender and balance that we're having, but
also it's because the rise of feminism movement in China
and also in general, I think that's happening everywhere in
the world. Is a younger generation, just like the less
and less find out marriage of healings. So the birth
rate in China has vummitted over the past several years
(13:06):
and to a degree that you know, it really affected
the real estate market and everything, but it's also affected
economy in a great way, and in the forthcoming that
we're only predicting that it's also going to be continued
to be affected by the birth rate. Job So the
government i think is very concerned about that. So as
(13:27):
a result, they are hosting nationwide matchmaking events to encourage
people to get married. Not that they're really saying it
that getting married is a must have experience for every
human being, and it's also kind of your young generation's
(13:48):
responsibility because getting married is a way to fulfill a
harmonious society of China. So they really want to encourage
people to get married and have kids.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
And and the scene in the movie where there's sort
of a government run speed dating going on and they
match up a firefighter, a young man with a woman
and he very awkwardly hands her roses, she awkwardly. They're
telling them now touch, hold hands, now, hug And it
was heartbreaking to see these two young people who literally
(14:22):
didn't know what to do with each other.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Yeah, I mean absolutely. And you also see their you know,
the government's side that they're a desperation of wanting these
people just go home and get married in and make baby. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
They literally said that I hope you can go get
married now. This is tell her you love her, Tell
you love her. Were just like they've never seen each
other before. This is wild.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Well.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
I highly recommend this film to everybody. I can't wait
to see it streaming in the new year. For now,
if you want to see an excerpt, there's a wonderful
short version of it on the New York Times called
Only the Lonely. The long form, which we will see soon,
is called The Dating Game. Director Violet fun Violet, thanks
so much for being here on KFI.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
And that brings the Doctor Wendy Wall Show to a close.
It's always my pleasure to be with you every Sunday
from seven to nine pm. You can also follow me
on my social media which is at doctor Wendy Walsh.
You've been listening to Doctor Wendy Walsh. You can always
hear us live on KFI Am six forty from seven
to nine pm on Sunday and anytime on demand on
(15:28):
the iHeartRadio app
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