From an outsider's perspective, today's Popular China might appear as a self‐confident and triumphant country. However, a large‐scale examination of the country's recent moral controversies reveals a very different picture, one that has much to do with the widespread local public perception of an ongoing “moral crisis” (Kleinman et al., 2011), whose examination requires careful attention placed on the ethical and affective aspects of the everyday lives of today's Chinese people. In this article, I propose to examine the anguish that Chinese bachelor youths and their concerned parents undergo and express, as they are confronted with the difficult process of finding a suitable mate for marriage. I examine the fears their celibacy generates, the mutual distrust that participants taking part in bachelors’ parents gatherings demonstrate, and the disputes these encounters engage. I analyze the moral world of today's urban China from the perspective of the very feelings and affects that pervade it. Highlighting the ways in which my interlocutors shared their emotions with me along the course of my fieldwork, carried out in the cities of Beijing and Chengdu, I will insist on the importance of these affects within an anthropological approach. The moral sensitivities contained in the maintenance of the economic and social situations of one's family reveal themselves as an exceptional resource for knowledge. By examining the political economy of sentiments within which parents and their children find themselves entrapped, I argue that we can gain a deeper understanding of the concrete consequences of today's societal transformations.

Caught in the context of a highly competitive development process, within the framework of a policy which limited their reproductive capacity to a single child, PRC urban families have, in recent decades, attached growing importance to their child's education, aiming to lead them to professional and personal success. This, however, also had an impact on the capacities of many young adults to marry early. In this context, the phenomenon of “marriage corners” mushroomed in large cities all over China beginning in the mid-2000s. Within China, this new practice generated criticism. These markets are seen as displaying conservative forms of marriage arrangement, the disregarding of romantic love, and forms of intergenerational power organization that may be considered backwards. However, by the criticisms it generates but as well the forms of relationships that it displays, the phenomenon can allow for a better understanding of the transformation of inter-generational relationships amongst urban middle-class, and on the norms framing the lives of the new generation.

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Le vingtième siècle a été marqué en Chine par les débats sur la place de la famille dans le choix du conjoint. En s’émancipant des générations antérieures, les nouvelles pourraient, pensait-on, gagner en caractère et en indépendance d’esprit, s’affirmer comme de véritables individus, et permettre à leur pays de progresser vers la modernité. Dès les années 1930, les lois des gouvernements nationalistes et communistes interdisaient l’intermédiation matrimoniale. Pourtant, la littérature scientifique montre que ces pratiques n’ont jamais cessé. Elles connaissent depuis les années 1980 un regain visible, agences matrimoniales, réunions parentales et émissions de rencontre connaissant un succès évident. Au point d’être aujourd’hui présentées sous le jour fataliste d’une institution inévitable dans la société chinoise. Cet article revient sur le rôle central que joue dans ce discours la figure de la marieuse et propose une analyse critique de la manière dont les pratiques de présentation du conjoint actuelles sont symboliquement rattachées à la figure des marieuses de la Chine ancienne.

Chinese practices of matchmaking have been controversial for over a century. Their continued transformations reveal a complex nexus of sentimental and material dimensions in the marriage-decision process at the heart of the negotiations between families and in their selections of proper candidates. This interplay between personal sentiments, concrete considerations, and the desire for success makes marriage controversial, as “love” is claimed and proclaimed at the same time. Moral debates around materialism, which have reverberated through the public sphere over the last decade, show how “love” acts as a tool of social reproduction while it also expresses sincere aspirations for an emotionally satisfying life. In comparative perspective, the complex of romantic love examined here reveals a recent, original synthesis of the tradition of parental arrangement and the political question of the place of love in modernity. The paper elucidates one of the contradictions within Chinese society today: the family remains central, but wider trends of individualization continue to unfold. A multifaceted understanding of love clarifies how it can bind families together while it also discourages others from pursuing romance.