China’s 35 million incels face bleak future of state-run AI ‘romance’ — are American men next?

In China today, there are more single men than the combined total population of Australia and Singapore. Thirty-five million “leftover” males, the legacy of a once-celebrated one-child policy and a cultural obsession with sons, are now wandering through life invisible, unwanted, and alone.

The government’s solution? Dating camps. Week-long romantic boot camps for men to learn how to talk to women, brush their teeth, and hopefully get lucky with one of the few women available.

It’s not satire. It’s state policy. And it reeks of desperation.

While China’s numbers are uniquely staggering, the West is heading in the exact same direction.

In some provinces, officials are subsidizing flirtation seminars. Men — mostly from rural backgrounds, working low-paid jobs — are taught how to make eye contact, speak without trembling, and understand female preferences. They practice smiling. They are warned not to talk about tractors, dead relatives, or pig feed on a first date.

Fear of incels

Local governments are pitching this as a social stability initiative, because too many single men in a society often mean unrest, crime, and, eventually, revolution. The Communist Party may not believe in God, but it definitely believes in the threat of incels.

Let’s stop and define that word before it gets distorted by the usual suspects. Incel — short for “involuntary celibate” — doesn’t mean terrorist or keyboard troll, no matter how loudly feminist bloggers try to paint it that way. It means exactly what it says: men who want a relationship but can’t get one.

Not by choice, but because they’ve drawn the short straw — genetically, financially, socially, or all three. In China, there are tens of millions of them, walking proof that when a society turns love into a transaction, only the top bidders get through the door.

Feminism’s lab leak

The reason dating camps exist is simple: Everything else has failed. Chinese women, especially those in cities, just aren’t interested. Why would they be? They’ve spent decades leapfrogging men in education and career status. Raised on a steady diet of Korean dramas, Western rom-coms, and aspirational Instagram reels, they now see marriage less as a necessity and more as a downgrade.

The guy who turns up in worn sneakers, quoting Xi Jinping, still living with his mother, and offering a life of austerity? He’s not Prince Charming. He’s a cautionary tale. And yes, China might look sealed off from the West, but don’t be fooled. The mind virus of modern feminism, which escaped from a university lab somewhere in California, leaked through the global media pipeline and infected everything it touched.

It told women they deserve everything and owe the world nothing, that motherhood is a trap, men are optional, children are a nuisance, and career is salvation. And now even in Beijing, you’ll find women with sky-high expectations and an allergic-like reaction to commitment.

An impossible standard

Today, to qualify as marriage material in China, a man must not only own a home (in one of the most inflated property markets on earth) and earn a steady wage. He also must be tall, handsome, emotionally literate, domestically competent, family-minded, and — critically — politically invisible to a regime scanning constantly for subversives and problematics.

It’s a checklist designed not by facts but by fiction. And for millions of men, the message is blindingly clear: You’re not good enough and never will be. So they retreat. Not to the village, but to the screen.

More and more are turning to AI girlfriends, chatbots programmed to listen, flatter, and never say “ew.” It’s not love. It’s code in a dress. But unlike real women, she won’t ghost you for being 5’5″ and earning less than a guy selling boiled eggs off a scooter.

Sound familiar, American reader?

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Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Don’t laugh

Because while China’s numbers are uniquely staggering, the West is heading in the exact same direction, just with better PR. The birth rate is plummeting. Marriage is on life support. Millions of young men in the U.S., U.K., and Australia are quietly disappearing into online worlds, their real ones offering nothing but rejection and ridicule.

We laugh at China’s “virtual girlfriend” industry, where AI chatbots simulate love for lonely bachelors. But those same bots now dominate Western app stores too. Replika. EVA AI. Nomi. The West isn’t mocking China. We’re beta-testing the same collapse.

In both East and West, the crisis isn’t really about dating. It’s about worth and meaning. A generation of men — especially those without degrees, city jobs, or six-figure paychecks — have been quietly told they’re surplus. Not needed as protectors. Not wanted as providers. Not seen as viable partners.

In China, it’s a demographic failure. In America, it’s cultural warfare dressed up as progress: “Do better,” “toxic masculinity,” “the future is female.”

Eradicating mutual need

China has its dating boot camps and AI waifus whispering sweet nothings in Mandarin. America has OnlyFans, SSRIs, and emotional detox tutorials from 23-year-old YouTubers. But none of it touches the core problem: We’ve waged a full-scale war on traditional male value. You can’t shame a man into being lovable. And you can’t seminar your way out of a dating market that treats him like a broken appliance.

The dating camps won’t work. You can’t reverse decades of isolation, emasculation, and techno-distraction with a weekend crash course on how to compliment a woman’s hair without sounding creepy. The deeper issue is that men and women no longer need each other in the same way they used to. That need has been severed, replaced by individualism on steroids, rising costs of living, and the dopamine drip of digital attention.

So we raise women to believe they should never rely on anyone. And we raise men to believe no one will ever rely on them. Then we stare blankly at the birth charts when neither wants to start a family.

Coming (non)-attractions

And if you think the CCP’s dating camps sound bleak, just wait until a U.S. senator proposes government-subsidized speed dating in Youngstown, Ohio, with tax rebates for every successful match. The disease is spreading. Fertility in the West is collapsing almost as fast as China’s. And our men aren’t just failing to marry. They’re failing to care. About women. About themselves. About the future.

We are witnessing the slow, quiet unmaking of civilizational continuity.

Thirty-five million forgotten men in China aren’t just China’s problem. This is a preview, a grim symptom of a larger decay: post-industrial societies that gutted meaning, mocked fatherhood, pathologized masculinity, and outsourced intimacy to machines.

What remains are men no longer needed by anyone and women no longer impressed by anything. There is no app for that. No seminar. No quick fix. Only a rather brutal reckoning.