One of the highlights of this year's Singles' Day was parents acting as proxies for their too-busy-to-attend children at the matchmaking events. This reflected the anxiousness of Chinese parents whose children have crossed the traditional age of marriage to find a life partner for them. Perhaps the lack of social security is to blame for the situation.

The marriage of many of the parents who today are looking for life partners for their children were arranged by the organizations they worked for. The established practice then was for "organizations" to take care of the needs of their workers. Things are radically different today. Every family has to pay for its needs, from food, housing and education to medical cost and retirement benefits. As a result, marriage is not just the traditional culmination of love; it involves a lot of economic calculations.

Given the absence of a sound medical insurance system in China, a deadly illness can easily drain a family's years of savings. And single children that most marriage-age people are could find it difficult to be the family's breadwinner as well as support two aging parents without the help of a partner.

A weekly matchmaking event specifically for parents, called "Blind Date Supermarket", is being held in Shanghai's People's Park for the past eight years. Every Saturday, parents are seen sitting with laminated sheets of paper containing their children's "bio-data" in front of them in the hope of finding a "potential match". The "bio-data" normally give details of their children's age, job, income, housing and/or car.

Parents' emphasis on family background to get a potential spouse shows that social mobility is weakening in China, says Sun Peidong, a sociologist with Shanghai's Fudan University who has conducted research into the matchmaking event in People's Park. It indicates that more people are marrying into the social tier they belong to, which is reinforcing the barrier between/among social strata.