Where do lonely hearts in China go now? Late-night live streams

For two weeks recently, most of my evenings were spent in Douyin’s live-stream section. On Douyin, TikTok’s sibling platform in China, shopping, entertainment and conversation blur into an endlessly scrollable feed. The most prominent virtual rooms here are for shopping: live-streaming hosts talking at high speed, shouting out discounts. Then come the talent rooms, where people sing, dance, play the guitar or do anything that might keep you there for a few seconds longer. As I watched, more categories began to surface: streams offering late-night companionship and newer animated-avatar rooms where hosts never show their real faces. They don’t promise cheaper lipstick or furious dancing. What they sell is company. I didn’t visit these rooms for any clear reason. One evening, while I was swiping past the usual noise, a calm, warm voice, reading a passage from a book I love, Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, stopped me. It felt easier to stay than to keep scrolling. The host’s voice had a tired huskiness, the kind you get from talking to strangers deep into the night. He said his job felt like that of Sisyphus, who has to keep pushing rocks up a hill forever. He had just a few dozen people in his room, so he tried to talk to everyone. It was pleasant and oddly comforting. I even set the alarm so I wouldn’t miss his 9pm stream. He would sing songs I picked and read paragraphs from a novel I liked. Through the tiny screen, it really felt like I had a friend on the other side of the phone. Sometimes, I wondered if this was what loneliness looked like now: no more dramatic break-ups or grand confessions, just a quiet dependence on a scheduled voice on an app. My peers in the post-85 demographic are smart enough to know it’s a performance, too busy to build new offline connections, and tired enough to accept such companionship as good enough for a Tuesday night. It asks so little of me: no need to dress up, commute or explain my past. I can drop in and out, buy 10 minutes of digital warmth with a small gift and close the app the moment real life intrudes. Once, in a private chat, he dropped the stage tone and told me his story. He is 29 and barely graduated high school. He has worked factory jobs. His family cannot support him financially. Last year, he fell in love with a woman entirely online; she scammed him and disappeared, leaving him with huge debts and a broken heart. That’s why he became a streaming host. He needed a way to pay back the money. Then he said something else that has stayed with me far longer than any detail of the scam: “For someone like me, this is the only job I can do that might actually let me jump class.” I can’t verify how much of his story is true in a documentary sense. People edit themselves online. But when he messaged that he felt drained and needed to take time off, it made sense. To keep that room going, he had to be endlessly gentle, responsive and available. The job consumes the very emotional resources he’s trying to sell. Another host I followed was a 22-year-old speaking through a customised character, a young fox. When you enter his room, you’re instantly jiejie – literally “big sister”, but a flirty, deferential term of endearment here for female viewers. The atmosphere is playful yet within platform regulations. The fox boy’s peak moments are in “PK” or “Player Kill” sessions, which are among the most profitable events in live streaming and involve several hosts competing for fans’ gifts. During these sessions, he usually pits himself against fellow hosts he calls friends; in private, he told me some of their banter was scripted. After we chatted for a while, he invited me to join one PK session. Before it started, he asked how much I had prepared. I had no idea there was a PK budget. When I asked how much he needed, he quickly said two or three “sports cars” – rather fancy virtual presents, at 120 yuan (US$17) each. I ended up sending three. The money felt like nothing in the moment, though it would show up in the bill eventually. Those in this ecosystem know exactly how to braid loneliness, desire, fantasy and simple exhaustion at day’s end and pull you towards spending. Among many of the Douyin viewers – students, office workers, those who have just lost their jobs or never had one – there might be a sense of being invisible. The likes of the fox boy are able to patch emotional vulnerabilities, call you jiejie and remember your username. After two weeks in these virtual rooms, I found myself strangely exhausted. It wasn’t just the late nights. It was the realisation that so much of the on-screen companionship is genuine and manufactured at the same time. The words are soft, the voices are warm, but there is a price list discreetly running underneath. This feels like a blueprint for how my generation is living with loneliness and insecurity. In a country where digital infrastructure is so advanced, almost every emotion can be routed through a screen and a carefully designed payment system. One person’s private way of getting through the night becomes another person’s revenue model.

Where do lonely hearts in China go now? Late-night live streams

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}I was swiping past the noise on Douyin when a calm, warm voice stopped me. So began my evenings in the world of companionship live streams

I was swiping past the noise on Douyin when a calm, warm voice stopped me. So began my evenings in the world of companionship live streams