China's LGBT 'cooperative marriages'
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 24 June 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
LGBT people in China sometimes arrange fake marriages to hide their sexuality. Homosexuality is not illegal in China but there is discrimination against LGBT people. In 2005 Lin Hai set up a website to allow lesbians and gay men to get in touch with each other. He came up with the idea to stop his family from putting pressure on him to get married. He spoke to Yashan Zhao in 2019 for Witness History. This programme is a rebroadcast.
(Photo: Lin Hai and his partner on holiday in Thailand in 2014. Credit: Lin Hai)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
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| 0:14.0 | Cladie Aide. |
| 0:16.0 | Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming. |
| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less |
| 0:24.9 | searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds. Hello and now here on the BBC World Service it's time for winners history. |
| 0:41.8 | I'm Yashon Jao. Today we are going back to 2005 when a |
| 0:47.5 | marriage website for gay men and lesbians were set up in China to allow them to hide their sexuality from their families and |
| 0:56.4 | workmates. |
| 0:59.4 | Have you got a girlfriend? I want to arrange a blind date for you. Can you give it to go? |
| 1:08.0 | My mom was nagging me almost every day to find a girlfriend. |
| 1:12.0 | When we got together for family festivals, |
| 1:14.8 | aunties would grill me about my private life. They would even offer to set me up with a |
| 1:19.2 | blind date. Ling-Hyi set up what he called his cooperative marriage website in Guangxi when he was 32 and still single. |
| 1:30.0 | In China, people are expected to get married soon after they're |
| 1:34.4 | 25. |
| 1:35.4 | I am gay. It was unrealistic to find a random girl to date at that time. |
| 1:43.0 | So it was a dilemma for me, |
| 1:45.0 | whether to find a girlfriend to keep my family happy |
| 1:48.0 | or to say no to them. |
... |
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