Reporter Marcel Theroux and director Frankie Fathers join some of China's many millions of male lonely hearts on their search for a wife, and meet some of the 'Love Hunters' working to find them an ideal bride.
Modern China is a place of extraordinary inequality, including in the love lives of its citizens. Marcel Theroux meets two people who represent the contrasting paths to love.
Li Dongmin is 39, and desperate to find a wife. He epitomises the plight of China's unwanted bachelors; the men who, thanks to the one-child policy, face a lifetime alone.
Dongmin is a migrant labourer from a tiny village 1000 miles from Beijing. He works as a cook in the capital, and sleeps in a dormitory to save money for a new house back home.
To the parents of potential brides he's too poor. And there's a deeper reason for his failure to find a wife: the huge surplus of unmarried men in China.
For 30 years, China has been conducting a vast, unintended experiment in sex selection. Ever since it became possible to determine gender in the womb, Chinese families have been illegally aborting girl foetuses.
By 2020, China is predicted to have 24 million marriageable men without partners: men whose future wives were never born.
Unreported World also films with 30-year-old Rong Na, an elegant and vivacious 'love hunter' employed by an agency called Diamond Love and Marriage to find wives for some of China's richest men.
Rong Na combs a shopping mall for attractive women. She's picking potential wives for a client she refers to as Mr X, who's very rich and can afford to be extremely choosy.
In the same mall, Li Dongmin's search also continues, at a free singles event. He plucks up the courage to chat to a few women; he even gets some phone numbers. His search for a wife continues, but with more hope than expectation. He knows the odds are stacked against him.
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