Lu Runqun and husband Wei Dongji communicated through letters for half a year and married in 1981. Photo: courtesy of Wei Jiaming

She is searching for:

â—‹ a Peking or a Tsinghua University graduate of economics

â—‹ with a hukou or permanent residency card for the most-developed areas

â—‹ working at a bank or leading State-owned company

In exchange, Luo Yufeng, 25, is:

â—‹ 1.46 meters (4 foot 9) tall

â—‹ with an average college diploma

â—‹ below-average looks

â—‹ working at Carrefour as a cashier in Shanghai

Luo had been distributing 500 leaflets seeking Mr Right in downtown Shanghai on November 13, her fourth set since the end of October, when the mainland media caught up with her.

Invited on a couple of TV talk shows, Luo told the audience she was "an unprecedented academic with no rival in the next 300 years."

"It's impossible for any young man to equal my talent," Luo said.

Nor will she be lowering her requirements, Luo told the Global Times, "because I definitely want a better life."

The publicity she generated means more men will now have noticed her, she theorized, with more opportunities to seal a deal.

"Women older than 28 are under great biological pressure for reproduction," she said. "I have no choice but to market myself as soon as possible."

Nearly one-third of 1,190,597 single women surveyed by the China Association of Marriage and Family Studies admitted that their requirements for a husband were too high in the 2009 Report on Marriage and Love Affairs in China.

Like Luo, 44 percent said they would not compromise.

Urban-rural dynamics have played a critical role in creating this curious new demographic: "urban unmarried women of a sound education, income, intelligence and appearance," is how the Ministry of Education defined them in August 2007. Everyone else calls them "shengnü" and it's not a nice name.

At least six women are competing to marry one man in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, according to the Guangzhou-based New Weekly on February 1.

There's a "structural imbalance between men and women at the best marrying age," said Chen Xiaomin, deputy secretary of the Shanghai Association of Marriage and Family Studies.

"It's a sign of growing individualism in a country deeply influenced by patriarchal power and experiencing great leaps in social values," said Li Yinhe, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Marriage of convenience

Wei Jiaming, 27, publicized her criteria for an ideal partner online while launching a cycling campaign to collect donations for poor mothers nationwide.

She had quit her job as an accountant in PwC's Guangzhou office in late 2008 and spent all her 100,000 yuan ($14,700) savings on a 2,025-kilometer trip from Guangzhou to Shanghai.

"I'm looking for a real estate owner taller than 1.73 meters with a monthly income bigger than 15,000 yuan ($2,200)," she wrote in her blog.

It was "excessive working pressure" that had left her single, she explained.

"I don't have time to meet or hang out with men, but I realized that there could be no happy ending without efforts."

Wei is now dating one of the 2,000 candidates who replied to her request.

"I sometimes sketch out a fairytale wedding picture in my brain, but I'm in no hurry to make a serious decision," Wei said. "A woman is best advised to remain independent and get to know her partner better during the run-in period before marriage."

That's bad news for Wei's grandmother: Wu Shuqing, 87.

"Don't be over picky," Wu said. "Women fade too easily. It's the greatest blessing to marry a man who truly respects and treasures you…"

Wu paused, eyes misty.

Born in a poor village of Shunde, today a district in the prefecture-level city of Foshan, Guangdong Province, Wu lost her mother in early childhood. Her father was forced to join the military and never returned.

In 1930, Wu was trafficked to Guangzhou as a servant girl. Starving, aimless, down and out, she needed a man fast.

Through a matchmaker, Wu agreed to become the concubine of the owner of two grocery stores, 20 years her senior.

The couple lived with two sons and five daughters in a 50-square-meter wooden house in Guangzhou until he died in 1992.

"We rented it," Wu said. "I could always smell the mildew in the air. The roof leaked and the stairs creaked – a lot like my marriage."

"My daily task was to look after our children and finish all the housework. My husband didn't talk much to me because I'm illiterate."

Wu's husband didn't even look after her when she fell sick.

"Inferior to men, women prioritized economic stability in marriage in those days."

Marriage of revolution

Although women gained equal rights after 1949, society still offered little room for courtship and inadequate tolerance toward flirting between unmarried men and women, said Li Huiying, deputy director of the Center for Research on Women at the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in Beijing.

"Most marriages at that time were pushed by parents and the Party," said Tang Meifang, 79, daughter of a former landlord in Jiangsu Province. She divorced a vendor and married a doctor in the People's Liberation Army.

"Chats between couples usually focused on how to advance themselves, to achieve Communist visions and to be named a 'revolutionary family'," Tang said.

Between 1948 and 1966, a woman would weigh her suitor's political status, family background and social class, according to a report written by Xu Anqi, a researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

During the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, millions of educated young women who trekked from the cities to work alongside farmers in the fields ended up marrying men in rural areas.

"Love was considered bourgeois while marriage was distorted into merely a shelter from tough natural conditions," said Wang Xueru, a women in her 70s who was dispatched to the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and stayed there for the rest of her life.

Chinese women of that generation "never experienced the innocence of love and the beauty of passion," said contemporary writer Hu Fayun.

Big kissy bit

Love didn't even get a mention until Romance on Lushan Mountain, the 1980 movie featuring New China's first big screen kiss.

Then in April the same year, the amended New Marriage Law stipulated that "family planning shall be practiced" and "divorce shall be granted if husband and wife both desire it."

"After university entrance exams resumed nationwide in 1977, my friends dreamed of falling in love with a well-educated and ambitious young man," according to Wei's mother 64-year-old Lu Runqun, a nurse at the First Affiliate Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province.

Fond of mountain climbing, movie-going, poetry, dancing and on a 100 yuan monthly salary, Lu never ran short of admirers.

"I got left on the shelf because my parents' marriage was rather frustrating," she said.

"It was an era of fantasy and despair, of idealism and compromise."

The Chinese tend to think it's unnatural not to want a spouse, said Zheng Qiong, 41, a single TV producer in Beijing. "There's still a mindset that it's better than being alone," she said.

This haunting psychological dilemma has spawned a lucrative market.

The country has more than 10,000 organizations with an annual business volume of more than 2 trillion yuan by 2010, according to Tian Fanjiang, director-general of the China Committee of Matchmaking Service Industries.

Zhang, 33, director of a private Beijing company in the culture industry, spent 18,000 yuan on a one-year package with Baihe, China's largest professional online matchmaker. She gradually overcame her fears of sexual intimacy and got engaged with another member recommended by the website.

Matchmaking shows are also doing nicely. Hunan TV reality show Let's Date is the second-most popular nationally.

Mass media and industry insiders have somewhat exaggerated the so-called shengnü problem, believes a department director of the Women's Studies Institute of China in Beijing. "The boom in single women is just an inevitable social trend amid urbanization," Jiang Yongping said.

In reality, the traditional purpose of marriage – fertility and reproduction – is of declining relevance in China, said Tang Can, a demography expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.

China's marriage rate in 2008 was 8.3 out of every thousand, 48 percent down from the figure in 2000, according to the latest statistics from the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

"Don't Get Married. Enjoy Deceiving Men," was one slogan exhibited by Yi Yang, a 28-year-old artist in her sex-themed oil paintings on the streets of Beijing's Central Business District.

"Marriage is not a must while sex is a necessity," Yi said. "If you are tied to a man too early, you lose other opportunities to select the fittest partner to provide the best genes for your offspring."

Mainstream culture will eventually identify single women as a valid niche in an increasingly diverse society, academician Tang said.

"Chinese women will not be liberated either in or out of wedlock until the traditional paradigm assuming men outweigh women and the mental belt locking woman's chastity disappears from our marriage values," sexologist Li Yinhe said.

Li herself never remarried after the death of her husband Wang Xiaobo, one of China's most innovative writers of the 20th century, in 1997.

Asked why she didn't follow her own advice and remarry, Li replied, "No comment."

Fast facts: shengnü

More than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without a wife by 2020, estimated the 2010 Social Bluebook compiled by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), citing a male-female sex ratio at birth of 123 to 100 among the population aged below 4 as the cause.

Yet this finding does not contradict the shengnü phenomenon of urgent competion between women on the marriage market this decade, sociologists argue. The cause of this competition is an "oversupply of women at the top of the social pyramid", said Peking University demographic expert Guo Zhigang.

"If we rank single Chinese men and women into four hierarchical categories, it would be difficult to match the academically and financially successful single women with men of equal or lesser qualifications based on the traditional mindset that most women prefer to marry up while most men prefer to marry down.

"Thus there is bound to be a surplus of unmarried successful women," Guo said. "And that number will pro-gressively rise with women's growing participation in economics and politics."

Women are also traditionally considered marriageable during a narrower age window than men, he said.

"A woman's biological clock has greater dependence on aesthetics and traditional values, which limits her ideal marriage age between 18 and 35, while a man's marriageable age can extend up to 60," he said.

"If the parental gender solution worsened and the traditional paradigm for women to marry stronger men collapsed, shengnü would become a historical phenomenon."