Chinese Bride: A Portrait of a Modern Chinese Bride, Facts & Costs

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Mail Order Bride-US

18 min readMay 24, 2024

Though Chinese is still viewed as a pretty homogeneous or even closed society, is getting more and more modernized and open, and that affects all aspects of life, including the institutions of marriage and family. Today, a man can really meet a Chinese bride, and I’m going to explain how exactly this segment of the international dating market works.

❤️ Success rate: 80%
💳 Average cost of mail order bride: from $6,500
👩 Average age of foreign brides for marriage: 24
📱 Best site to find a Chinese mail order bride: SakuraDate
💔 Average divorce rate: 20%

Best Sites To Find Chinese Brides

There are some reputable, popular, or promising dating sites where you can meet Chinese mail order brides or single Chinese women looking for foreign boyfriends, and I have already chosen a few best of them.

SakuraDate — best overall
EasternHoneys — best for a social media-like experience
TheLuckyDate — best for casual chatting
NaomiDate — best for interactive communication
OrchidRomance — best for mobile use

“Each dating site has special features, pros, and cons, but if you’re looking for the most optimal solution, you might choose SakuraDate. I can be pretty effective but only if you’re seeking a serious relationship. Profiles of Chinese girls registered here are very detailed, and there are enough features that help build strong and deep emotional connections even at a distance.”

How to Find a Chinese Bride: Best Way to Meet Chinese Brides

There are three countries in the world that lead the global dating app consumption — it’s China, Russia, and Brazil. There are over 33.5 million active Chinese online dating users, and though most of them use Zhen’ai, Baihe Jiayuan, Yidui, and other local dating apps, a lot enter the international dating scene. It’s an especially big trend among younger people who often note it’s difficult to meet people offline.

Basically, that’s the main reason why joining one of the reputable Chinese mail order sites or niche Asian dating sites is the best option for most foreign singles — it’s all about the user base and direct access to profiles of Chinese women.

Contrary to popular belief, niche websites with foreign brides and, particularly, Chinese mail order brides, offer something more than just messaging. A user who chooses one of the high-quality international dating websites gets access to detailed profiles of Chinese women, can watch verification videos, make phone and video calls, send audio messages, etc. Still, I must admit it largely depends on the site — choosing the right platform is really half the battle.

“The Chinese online dating market is unique — it’s more homogenous compared to local dating markets in most other countries of the world. Still, the number of Chinese users who prefer international dating is growing every year, and business reacts accordingly, launching new online dating platforms to meet a Chinese mail order wife or just a Chinese girlfriend. Here are some of the most promising websites I’d recommend taking a look at:
SakuraDate. That’s a new site that’s growing very, very fast. There are thousands of Chinese women already registered on the platform, and some interesting and useful features like audio and video messaging are offered.
EasternHoneys. That’s the old platform known as one of the top places to meet Asian women. It works pretty much like a half-social networking site and suits the needs of all categories of singles regardless of their relationship goals, so if versatility and special features are some of your main priorities, you can give it a try.
TheLuckyDate. This site works perfectly for those who used to use apps like Tinder but want to enter the international dating scene. There are old good swiping, detailed profiles of Chinese women, and some great communication tools.
It’s all about setting priorities. When you do it, you’ll be able to make the right choice, and it goes for everything, from selecting the country to find a wife to picking the best dating site.”

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Other Popular Ways to Find a Chinese Bride

Of course, there are always alternatives. If niche online dating services that connect men with Chinese mail order wives or Chinese girls for dating don’t work for you for some reason, you can consider choosing one of the following options.

🩷 Mainstream dating apps

Though apps like Tinder have not only single Chinese ladies registered on the platform, finding a Chinese partner using them is still real. So, if you don’t mind putting a bit more effort and spending a bit more time searching for a partner, it might work for you.

Pros & cons of mainstream dating apps:

➕ Free messaging

➕ Huge user base all over the world

➕ Ease of use

➖ No advanced communication features

➖ Most Chinese girls looking for local matches

✈️ Independent trips or immigration to China

Of course, you’ll have the best chance to meet a special Chinese girl in China, so if you’re adventurous and/or wealthy enough, a long vacation in this country might be perfect for you.

Pros & cons of going to China:

➕ Chance to learn a lot about the culture

➕ Direct communication with Chinese women

➕ Developed country with business opportunities

➖ Too expensive for most men

➖ No guarantee of success

👩‍❤️‍👨 Meeting Chinese women in your home country

You can search for a Chinese bride on mainstream dating apps like Tinder, just not in China but in your area, or visit Chinese/Asian-themed events if they take place in your city.

Pros & cons of searching for a Chinese bride in your country:

➕ Direct communication

➕ Opportunity to meet a Chinese girl for free

➕ No need to leave the country now or in the future

➖ Narrow dating pool

➖ No guarantee of meeting a marriage-minded Chinese woman

Compare the options considering your specific goals and priorities, and you’ll make the right choice.

How to Get a Chinese Bride

So, men can’t mail order Chinese brides — they can only meet them online or offline. If you choose the Internet and a niche website with Chinese girls for marriage, you’ll still need a strategy in order to succeed. It must not be complex or expensive, though. Let’s take a look at some specific steps that a man should take on the example on the SakuraDate website.

1. Set up an account and make it work

“It may seem an obvious recommendation, but I’ve seen enough dating sites with Chinese wives or girls from other countries to be completely sure that men have low-effort profiles much more often, even if they are the ones who pay for the services. On SakuraDate, you can write great About Me and Looking for stories, the actual essays describing everything you’re looking for a partner, so why miss this opportunity?”

2. Use search, look through profiles, and learn more about who you can meet on the site

“I’d also recommend seeing multiple ladies’ profiles to evaluate your chance to meet a perfect Chinese mail bride on this particular website. On SakuraDate, as well as on other top sites, using search features are completely free, and access to profiles is unlimited. You can also watch 1 video from Gallery without paying, and spend your bonus credits on chatting with a Chinese bride.”

3. Upgrade and choose your favorite communication features

“If you like what and who you see on the site, making your first purchase makes sense. Test different communication features, Letters, chat, audio messaging, etc., find out which are the most effective for them, and use them depending on the situation. Also, choose Chinese women to talk with carefully. That will help you save a lot of credits and therefore, money.”

4. Start a long-distance relationship and plan your trip to China or a third country

“Yes, relationships are started online, and then a couple meets. It makes sense considering that they usually live thousands of miles away from each other and need guarantees. So, once you meet a special Chinese mail order bride, don’t be afraid to tell her about how you feel directly, build a relationship online and go to meet her offline once you are ready. SakuraDate, as well as most other sites in this segment, don’t provide travel services, so you’ll need to arrange a trip yourself.”

Chinese Bride Cost

❗Men can’t literally mail order Chinese brides, just like brides from any other country. The term “cost” in this context is widely used, that’s true, but it refers not to a direct purchase of a bride but to the total price that a man will pay for online dating services, trips, and additional services. Neither a dating site nor the bride herself doesn’t get any financial compensation of any kind.

Though men don’t pay for Chinese mail order brides, it would be wrong to say that one can get a Chinese wife for free. There’ll be expenses, and I’m going to estimate the main of them below.

Online dating expenses

It’s not easy to estimate the cost of online dating services for one simple reason — the top sites usually have credit systems, which means that a user can buy as many credits as he wants to and spend them on the features he wants to use at the moment. So, the price will depend on the pricing policy of the site and your personal choices. On such platforms, most men spend around $100 a month, so the total cost for a 1-year period will be $1,200.

“If you’re looking for some cost-effective solutions, you can consider choosing one of these platforms:
SakuraDate — 20 free bonus credits, the costs start at $0.8 per credit
EasternHoneys — 20 free bonus credits, the costs start at $0.14 per credit
TheLuckyDate — 2,000 free bonus credits, the costs start at $0.20 per 100 credits
If you choose a site that offers good value for money and make conscious choices when looking for a Chinese wife, you’ll be able to spend less.”

Trip costs

One mid-range two-week trip to China will cost you around $2,500. Consider the number of trips and your traveling style when planning your budget, and you’ll estimate the total cost pretty accurately.

Visas

Your future Chinese wife may apply for a K-1 visa as your fiancee. It will cost around $1,200 (of course, a bride can pay, too, but in Chinese dating culture, such decisions aren’t always appreciated) not including further application for getting an adjustment status, which will cost around $1,200 more.

Wedding

In Chinese culture, a man is the one who normally pays for a wedding. Still, a couple still has the right to make choices, so you can spend just a few hundred dollars on a wedding license and a dinner at a restaurant or opt for a big wedding that will cost you $30,000+.

Author’s comment:

“Trips from New York to Beijing cost around $1,200 on average, and China isn’t the cheapest country. So, if you’re going to meet your Chinese bride and aren’t planning to meet her family and friends this time, you may consider going on vacation to another Asian country and meeting her there. For example, you can go to Vietnam — a beautiful and affordable country to visit and enjoy the new impressions you’ll get with your Chinese girlfriend. Consider the options — there are plenty of them, get creative, and you may find great alternative solutions.”

How to Save Money

If you want to cut costs, consider the following:

Watch your credits. Spend them only on communicating with Chinese women who meet your criteria.
Choose the right time for trips. Just go to China or another country where you’re going to meet your bride at a time when the tickets are cheaper.
Spend money on dates & presents wisely. Gifts aren’t cheap on dating sites, so buy them only if you’re sure you may have already met your perfect Chinese bride.

Plan your budget at every stage and remember that it’s not the best situation for making spontaneous choices. If you remain more rational than emotional, you’ll save a lot of time and money and still achieve your main goal.

Success Stories

“At some stage in my life, I thought I wouldn’t be able to survive another betrayal. I was single for years but I was still feeling the need to share my life with someone special. That made me think of how I could find a family-minded and loyal woman and I started doing my research. I read a lot about family values in different places and chose Asia as a place where the likelihood of meeting a family-oriented woman is the highest. That was the best decision as I’m going to marry a Chinese girl the next month and she’s pretty much everything I’ve ever dreamed of. She’s beautiful and feminine, 100% devoted to a relationship, caring and loving. I made mistakes, but in the end, I ended up being with the right woman.”

“I’ve joined a SakuraDate because I was curious about this entire thing and I also always felt attracted to Asian women. It’s been two months since I joined it, and I was like just enjoying chatting and sexting with attractive women until a cute girl made her first move on me and I’ve never kept looking for anyone else on the site or in real life. She likes everything I like, she has so deep thoughts so that’s never just about discussing daily stuff and nothing more, she’s incredibly beautiful and very open-minded considering that she was born in a quite conservative country. We met IRL twice, and call me crazy, I think it’s enough for me to understand I’m going to marry her in the near future.”

Cons of Finding a Bride from China

The strong impact of materialistic culture
The necessity of maintaining a relationship with her entire family
Language and cultural barriers

Relationship Advice:

“Though building a relationship with someone from another culture may seem to be a hard task, it’s not exactly true. It will require two things — patience and the ability to listen and compromise. You can help yourself a lot if you do research on the Chinese dating culture and find out what will be appreciated and what won’t, and you can tell your Chinese bride about your traditions. You know, it’s about discussing things, understanding what your partner thinks of one or another situation, custom, whatever, and then finding common grounds. Your differences can make you stronger if you are motivated enough to stay together.”

Chinese Bride Interview

The best way to learn more about the motivation of a Chinese mail order bride, her goals, expectations, and the experience overall is to ask her about all these things. I’ve been contacting women on dating sites to find a Chinese woman who’d agree to talk to me and met Lisa on EasternHoneys.

Q: Lisa, would you call yourself a mail order bride?

A: Well, not exactly — at least I don’t identify as Chinese mail order wife or something. I’m definitely a Chinese, and I want to be a wife, I’m looking not just for a boyfriend but for a future husband, and yes, I want him to be from another country. But no one can mail order me. So, I just think it depends on how you call things. For me, I’m just a single girl looking for a match, just like millions of people all over the world.

Q: For how long have you been using a dating site to find a foreign boyfriend?

A: It’s been around two months since I signed up.

Q: You seem to have a successful career and you are studying at a college right now. Aren’t you afraid to change your life completely and lose your job and degree?

A: To be honest, I now doubt that accounting is for me. So I’m a kind of at crossroads now. I don’t think that if I meet someone and will need to leave I’ll lose a lot. I like my job, that’s true. I’m also a pretty career-driven person but you know, there’s the right things to do in the right time. I’m only 26, so I guess I have enough time to get an education in another country if necessary, and I just want the decent man to be with me on my way to success. I also don’t abandon the idea of having kids for something. Now, I even consider having kids, taking a little break from work and study and then going back to them once they go to school. I’m open to all the opportunities, so now I rather think that I make decisions depending on the circumstances.

Q: Sorry for asking, but why didn’t you find a man in China? It doesn’t seem that you would have any problem with finding a date.

A: Yes, there are a lot of hot single guys in China, no complaints about that. However, most of them are focused on their careers and not on their relationships. I see that a lot when seeing peers. It’s a normal thing but I want to see the world and I want to live my life with someone who’ll appreciate my presence in his life. I realize it will probably be an older man who has already built his career and I’m okay with that.

Q: What do you expect from your future husband?

A: I want a confident man who knows what he wants in life and knows how to achieve it. I’m not going to lie, I’m also looking for someone who is ready to take responsibility and provide for a family if necessary. I mean, when I get pregnant, I don’t want to worry about money or anything else. I also want him to share some of my interests and have his own — that’s how we grow personally, and that’s how we’ll be able to grow together as a couple.

Q: What kind of men did you meet on the site? What kinds of guys attract you and who do you block right away?

A: I’ve met a few not so cute men here, and yes, I blocked them right away. You see, I think that’s the wrong place for men looking for nothing but dirty talks. I’ve met enough such guys on Tinder. There are also guys I don’t block but stop talking to, and these are men who don’t know what to say besides just complimenting a girl. I don’t have any special expectations about all the rest — I just like a good conversation and if I realize a guy is hardly my perfect match, I value a good talk. I like guys who show interest in a personality, and I would love to learn more about them.

Why do Chinese Women Look for Foreign Husbands?

Generally speaking, a Chinese mail order wife may be looking for a foreign husband for a wide variety of reasons. But in the vast majority of cases, just like Lisa, women see joining a dating site as an easy way to narrow the search to marriage-minded men. Also, it’s often about the attraction to the culture, bad previous relationships experience and the desire to start another type of relationship which is mostly explained by the desire to find a more open-minded partner.

Chinese Mail Order Bride Statistics

The number of Chinese mail order brides and intermarriage at large is growing year by year. From 2000 to 2010, interethnic intermarriage households increased by 9.26%, while the number of Chinese women immigrating to get married to the US alone was around 1,000 in 2019.
The age difference between Chinese women and their foreign husbands usually ranges from2 to 9 years.
The average age of Chinese women at first marriage was 25.7 in 2017.
The fertility rate in China is only 1 child per household, but this is rather explained by the results of bad demographics policy than the lack of desire to have children.
The divorce rate in China is decreasing, proving that the institution of the family is strong here. In 2021, it was just 2.01 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants.

Chinese Mail Order Bride Scam

If you’re going to search for Chinese mail order brides online, you need to keep in mind the fact that online scams, and in particular, mail order bride scams, are real. Here are some common schemes that you may face:

⚠️ Fake site scams. You may see sites with multiple yet low-quality profiles of Chinese mail order brides with fake pictures, sometimes photos of different people, sending the same messages from different accounts. The only goal is to make you respond to a message, and that will go nowhere.
⚠️ ‘Princess in trouble’ scams. In some cases, you meet a fake Chinese mail order wife who seems to be everything you’ve ever wanted and more, things are moving fast, but one day she gets in trouble and asks you for financial help. Needless to say, it’s a scam.
⚠️ Personal and financial data scams. Scammers may also try to get your information to steal money from your account or to blackmail you, and that’s why following all data protection rules is that important.

The good news is that you can avoid them all if you follow these simple rules:

❗ Choose the website carefully, paying special attention to profile quality.
❗ If anything seems weird and unrealistic, that’s actually a good reason to leave the site.
❗ Beware if things are moving too fast and a person is acting as if they’re just trying to gain your trust.
❗ Never send money to anyone.
❗ Never agree to accept it.
❗ Don’t share any kind of information another person just doesn’t need to know about you, and be careful with links shared by others.

It’s all about safety. Ignoring any of these simple rules can result in serious problems. Be cautious, remember the recommendations, and you’ll meet legit Chinese mail order brides without losing your time and money.

How to Take a Chinese Bride to the US

If you’re going to marry a Chinese woman you’ve met online, and if you’re going to do it in the United States, there’s an algorithm of actions you need to take:

File an application for a K-1 visa. It’s done by an American citizen, and the Immigration Service shares the information with the Chinese embassy.
A bride and a groom must collect documents (birth certificates, divorce certificates, medical exams for a bride, etc.) and collect evidence of being in a relationship.
Then, a couple is interviewed, and if everything goes right, they wait until an application is approved.
Once a bride gets a visa, she can enter the country to get married within 90 days.

These are the basic K-1 visa requirements. The entire process may take 6–12 months, and that’s an important point to consider. Also, if a bride has children, you’ll also need to file the applications for them (K-2 visas). A couple may also consider getting married in China, but a now-wife will still need a visa to move to the United States — it just will be a foreign relative visa.

Conclusion

Although there are certain cultural differences and language barriers, China remains one of the best countries for international dating. It’s all about the numbers: the Chinese dating market is extremely large and constantly growing — for example, websites like SakuraDate and EasternHoneys still have more Chinese girls than foreign men, and that creates a unique environment where it’s not men who have to compete for women but quite the opposite.

That’s why niche Chinese brides sites are so popular and effective, and that’s where their main advantages (like a high response rate and active audience) are rooted. Mainstream dating apps can work, too, as well as Facebook or even offline dating, but I stick to mail order bride platforms. They are large, popular, convenient, and affordable, and that’s all you need for a successful online dating experience.

FAQ

How do I marry my Chinese wife?

To marry a Chinese partner, you’ll need to follow specific procedures, which include registering your marriage at the local civil affairs bureau in China and providing necessary documents like passports and health certificates. It’s essential to understand the legal requirements.

Can a foreigner marry a Chinese person?

Yes, foreigners can marry Chinese nationals. The process involves obtaining official documents from your home country and submitting them along with a completed marriage application at the local civil affairs office in China.

Can I live in China if I marry a China bride?

Marrying a Chinese citizen can qualify you for a family reunion visa, allowing you to live in China. The visa requires regular renewals and registrations with local authorities, but it does enable you to reside with your spouse.

How much does a wife cost in China?

The concept of “buying a wife” is a misunderstanding. Relationships should be about mutual respect and love. In China, however, there are marriage-related expenses like the dowry or “bride price,” which is more about tradition and showing commitment.

Do foreigners pay the bride price in China?

Foreigners may be expected to follow local traditions such as paying a bride price, especially in more traditional families. This is not a requirement but can be part of respecting and honoring family customs.

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