Blurring tradition and modernity: Understanding young Chinese diasporas’ online dating experiences

This thesis uses semi-constructed in-depth interviews and thematic analysis to investigate how cultural-social and economic-political influencers in contemporary China shape young Chinese diasporas’ online dating experiences, values, and parental pressure on children’s mate choices. Contributing to Users and Gratification theory, this thesis identifies a culturally embedded motivation among Chinese diasporas who use online dating as a gateway to intercultural understanding. By demonstrating how tradition and modernity blur into the Chinese dating culture as the Chinese way of modernization and using cosmopolitanism theory to explain it, this thesis highlights that modernity theory is Eurocentric, as it dominantly positions western romance as the way of modernism. This thesis suggests that young Chinese demonstrate autonomy and rationality, and consider self-interests when confronting parental influences on their mate choices. Thus, Hofstede’s cultural dimension of collectivism that individuals subsume their interests to the interests of the whole group could not be applied to the contemporary Chinese context in terms of parental pressure. Instead, a cosmopolitan perspective based on non-western participants’ understanding about how meaning of action is constructed, and the acknowledgment of their traditional and modern cultures and economicpolitical background is recommended.