Undercover Reporters Expose a Priced Companionship Trade Inside China's 'Dazi' Trend
An undercover report by Yangcheng Evening News finds that China's 'dazi' culture — strangers matched online for meals, trips and concerts — is being commandeered by paid-companionship operators who grade their services in coded slang and steer clients into bars, tours and off-platform deals.
Dazi culture (搭子) began as the most casual form of friendship China's cities have yet produced: a stranger recruited online for exactly one activity — a hotpot dinner, a gym session, a concert — with no obligation to ever meet again. It has become close to a default social technology for young urbanites; one media survey puts the share of young people with at least one dazi above seventy percent.
According to an undercover report by Yangcheng Evening News, the format's innocence is precisely what is being sold. Reporters found operators running paid group chats that screen members by looks and keep them organized over the long term. Accounts presenting themselves as "meal dazi" or "travel dazi" steer the people who contact them toward designated bars or particular tour groups — then, once the booking is made, find a reason not to come along at all.
The trade has developed its own argot. In recruitment posts for paid local companions, a color scale — "pure green" (纯绿), "half green" (半绿), "non-green" (非绿) — signals how far the service goes; hand-holding and hugs are explicitly priced, and transactions are pushed off-platform to where moderators cannot see them. A Shandong TV bulletin carried in the coverage reported paid companionship operating out of private cinemas, with packages starting at 299 yuan and add-on "games" whose names left little to the imagination.
At the high end the numbers stop being pocket change: Red Star News footage circulating with the report describes high-end companionship travel as a front for prostitution, with overnight packages listed at 8,000 yuan.
The commentary that followed was less shocked than weary. Commenters catalogued the shill economy the reporters described — the bar shill who runs up an expensive tab, the tour shill who vanishes after the deposit — as familiar fauna of the internet's gray belt, now wearing a friendlier label. "The essence of socializing is resonance and companionship, not a cold price list," one widely shared reaction put it, before arriving at the sentence the topic kept returning to: don't let dazi become the fig leaf for illegal trade.
What happens next depends on platforms and regulators, which is the report's unresolved point. Dazi posts live on the same mainstream feeds where young people look for dinner company; a color-coded listing is legible to anyone who knows the code, and to no moderation system that doesn't. The advice now circulating under the report is the kind no one should need in a friendship app: find out what, exactly, is being priced.