China's Lonely Hearts

Modern China is a place of extraordinary inequality. Nowhere are its contradictions more visible than in the love lives of its citizens. Unreported World follows two characters who represent the contrasting paths to love in modern China.

39 year old Li Dongmin is desperate to find a wife.  He epitomizes the plight of China's unwanted bachelors; the men who, thanks to the one-child policy, are doomed to a lifetime of being single. Dongmin is a migrant labourer from a tiny village a thousand miles from Beijing.  He works as a cook in the capital, and sleeps in a dormitory to save money for a new house back in the provinces. Being unmarried at Dongmin's age is a humiliation. Back in the dirt poor village where Dongmin grew up, his elderly mother weeps as her fellow villagers laugh at his inability to find a bride.

Critics choice

- Independent, The Times, Telegraph