Free Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos

she told me. In 2003 the Internet had just sixty-nine million users (5 percent of the population), but it was growing at 30 percent a year. That fall, a Web portal called Sohu reported that the most-searched-for name on its site, once “Mao Zedong,” was now “Mu Zi Mei,” a sex blogger. When Mu Zi Mei posted an audio recording of one of her assignations, demand crashed her server. (To those who gasped, she replied, “I express my freedom through sex.”)
    Gong Haiyan paid five hundred yuan (about sixty dollars at the time) to an early online dating service. She selected twelve men and sent them messages. When she got no response and complained to the company, she was told, “Look at yourself—you’re ugly, and you go after these high-quality men? No wonder you got no replies.” She tracked down one of the bachelors and learned that he hadn’t even registered with the site. The photograph, the vitals, the contact info—all had been cobbled together from other online sites. China had mastered the fake Polo shirt, and now it was turning to the counterfeit date. “I wasn’t thinking about being an entrepreneur—I was just so angry,” Gong said. “I wanted a site for people who were in the same position I was in.”
    She mapped out a simple design on Front Page, the website software. She named her business Love21.cn. To sell ads, she hired her brother Haibin, who’d taken some computer classes after dropping out of high school. She signed up her friends, and other customers followed. A software developer agreed to invest the equivalent of fifteen thousand dollars. (Later, he met his wife on the site.) Gong used the money to expand, and she discovered that there was more demand than she had imagined. In remote areas, where computer scanners were still hard to come by, customers began to send photographs by post. People were signing up at a rate of nearly two thousand a day.
    Gong was nothing like the other Web entrepreneurs I knew in China. For one thing, the top ranks of Chinese technology were dominated by men. And unlike others who glimpsed the potential of the Internet in China, she didn’t speak fluent English. She didn’t even have a degree in computer science. She still had a trace of the countryside about her. She spoke at high volume, except before crowds, when her voice trembled. She was five feet three, still with narrow shoulders, and when she talked about her business, I got the feeling that she was talking about herself. “We’re not like you foreigners, who make friends easily in a bar or go traveling and chat up a stranger,” she told me. “This is not about messing around for fun. Our membership has a very clear goal: to get married.”
    In her spare time, she wrote. The Internet was taking off as a forum for all kinds of ideas, and she carved out a reputation for herself as the “Little Dragon Lady,” an advice columnist who was attuned to the problems of the People’s Republic. She flipped through messages from anguished bachelors, concerned parents, and anxious brides—many of them current or former members of her dating service.
    Often, her advice read like an argument against China’s ancient pieties. If your mother-in-law sees you as “nothing but a baby-maker” and your husband won’t help, she told one new wife, forget the husband, “get some courage, and get out of that family.” In the case of a newly rich couple, in which the husband had taken to sleeping around, she applauded the wife for not becoming a “blubbering, feeble, pitiful creature,” and advised her to make him sign a contract that would cost him all his assets if he cheated again. Above all, Gong framed the search for love as a matter of self-reliance. Heaven, she wrote, “will never throw you a meat pie.”

 
    FOUR
    APPETITES OF THE MIND
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    Not long after Gong Haiyan launched her