Millions of lonely Chinese bachelors are turning to live-streams for human contact

In September of 1980, millions of Chinese couples received devastating news.

An open letter from the country's Communist government proclaimed that from then on, parents were allowed to have just one child per family. The country's population was getting out of hand, the letter said. Families were growing unsustainably large.

Families listened, but they also began systematically aborting millions of female fetuses. It wasn't until this January - some 36 years later - that China finally lifted the ban on having multiple children. But the damage had already been done.

Today, China is teeming with single men. They are known as guanggun, or "bare branches." Like Japan's "herbivore men" and South Korea's singletons, they are a major factor behind the country's falling fertility rate, mainly because they outnumber women so drastically.

As a result, a bizarre aftershock has started to permeate Chinese culture. Around the country, millions of single men in their early 20s cope with the loneliness of urban isolation by watching random people live-stream themselves over the Internet.

Livestreaming is poised to become a lucrative industry in China, where beautiful women, hardcore gamers, and ordinary folks all create virtual "showrooms" to broadcast their lives to the masses.

As Bloomberg's Lulu Yilun Chen notes, the biggest streamers earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, most of it from the "virtual gifts" viewers buy for their favorites. Half of that money goes into the pockets of the hosting site, but the other half goes straight to the person doing the streaming.

"Guys are generally more shy in China, so they tend not to ask girls out. However, they're able to observe the way girls talk, where their interests lie and how they look through livestreaming," says a 23-year-old man from Hubei province, who agreed to speak with Tech Insider via WeChat on the condition of anonymity.

The man says he began using the livestreaming services three months ago at the recommendation of a friend. He quickly began sending virtual gifts to the female hosts, mostly to hear them talk or sing. If done right, the gifts can lead to something more.

"As time goes on," he says, "you develop intimacy with the girl whom you paid a lot of attention and sent a lot of gifts to, and could end up hanging out in real life."

One of the fastest-growing startup sites is Ingke, a service headquartered in Beijing that allows people to flip through amateur broadcasts on their computer like channels on TV. In theory, there could be as many channels as there are users, which, by the latest estimate, is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million.

The closest American analogs to Inke are Twitch and Facebook Live, two services that also let people instantly open up their lives to Internet strangers. What makes Ingke different, however, is that it's dominated by young men pining after women.

Recent data, for instance, reveals 26% of live-stream viewers are under 18, while 60% are under 22. More than 75% of those viewers are male. As the livestreaming fan from Hubei explains, the fact many of these men are single creates an air of competition among viewers.

"If a female user is particularly pretty, the only way to get her attention is to spend more money," he says. "There's a ranking of users based on their spending. Those [livestreaming women who] are pretty, more articulate, or have a great sense of humor, tend to earn big. I know girls who easily fetched $5,000 per month by livestreaming a few hours per day."

Sometimes the content is extreme - in the vein of "Jackass" or viral YouTube stunts - all in the name of shock value. People have chugged bottles of alcohol and dined on maggots, Bloomberg's Chen says.

But a lot of the time, the stuff is pretty mundane. The livestreamer from Hubei watches girls talk, sing, and crack jokes. Other guys will tune in just to see a girl eating noodles or blowdrying her hair. It's not a fetish. It's just that these activities are the closest a lot of the men may come to having a relationship with a woman.

The average user already watches more than 135 minutes, or more than two hours, of these broadcasts a night. And unless the Chinese government decides to tighten its censorship rules and ban live-streaming altogether - a decision that seems unlikely given the profits it generates - the portion of guanggun who tune in will only increase.

That may seem like a depressing prospect. But for the millions of men who come home after work to empty apartments and log on to their computers, the trend is hardly that dire. All they see is a girl in a screen, slurping down her noodles. And that is enough.