DingTalk plays cupid for Chinese parents seeking partners for unwed children

It began as an enterprise productivity tool. Then, it became widely used for conducting online classes. Now, as many public places remain closed in China due to the coronavirus, Alibaba’s DingTalk has also become a platform for some seniors to find a match for their single adult children.

DingTalk’s recently released “Circle” function, which allows users to create interest-based communities to share information, has now been unexpectedly utilized by some parents to post detailed information about their unwed children, looking for potential dates, a video posted on Weibo yesterday by local magazine New Weekly shows.

According to the video, tens of parents have joined the new “matchmaking” groups on DingTalk. For instance, one circle called Ali Hongniang, meaning “matchmaker” in Chinese, has nearly three thousand members.

“My son is 25 years old, and had dozens of matchmaking experiences. He wants to find a girl like Dilreba,” one father says in a video, referring to famous Chinese actress and singer of Uyghur descent Dilraba Dilmurat.

“I’m here expecting to find a partner for my daughter,” another father says. “She is too busy with work and hasn’t found a partner at 35 years old. I worry about her.”

Previously, DingTalk has been affected by a slew of one-star reviews in the App Store from Chinese students who resented taking classes online. The platform then uploaded a video on video-sharing site Bilibili to ask “forgiveness” and better reviews from these pupils.

This new use for DingTalk might now garner more positive reviews. “Who knows how many stars these seniors will give DingTalk now,” reads a comment on Weibo.

DingTalk announced yesterday that 120 million students in 140,000 schools from more than 30 provinces across the country currently study on the platform, and over 3.5 million teachers are now livestreamers. Its servers crashed again this past Monday due to the huge traffic.