A Chinese province has launched a government-backed matchmaking app that has received mixed views from residents.

What happened: Midst China’s declining birth rate, The city of Guixi in Jiangxi province has found a solution to increase marriage rates and Get singles hitched up in town.

The east China city of around 640,000 people launched an app that uses data from individual residents to build a matchmaking platform called Palm Guixi. According to China Youth Daily, a state-run newspaper, the platform will arrange blind dates for singles in the city.

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Palm Guixi is part of Xi Jingping’s Local government initiative to boost marriage rates as The country faced a serious population crisis in the past decade. In 2021, there were 5.4 marriages per 1,000 people, compared to six in the US. reported The guard.

The state-sponsored dating service has met with skeptical reactions from Chinese online about the Twitter-like Weibo app. One of the users linking the government push to increase China’s rapidly declining birth rate said the Chinese are expected to “breed like pigs”.

Some microblogging users also raised their concerns about privacy, especially when such information ended up online without their consent. “A government-setup matchmaking platform is more trustworthy than commercial ones, which you at least have to pay for yourself,” said one Weibo user, adding that “we still have to take care of our private information.”

“Why isn’t there a database for rapists or perpetrators of domestic violence?” said another user.

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