But one Chinese company is thriving while doing both.įrom its Beijing headquarters, BlueCity has quietly built China’s largest internet company geared toward LGBTQI people, an online dating empire that rivals competitors like the U.S.-based Match Group. “It’s hard to run a sexual minority organization in China, and it’s also hard to run an internet company now,” said Chuncheng Liu, a PhD student at the University of California San Diego researching public health and the politics of algorithms in China.
The message came amid a wide-reaching government crackdown on technology firms, which caused many of their stocks to go into free fall. In early July, Tencent suddenly erased over a dozen LGBTQI university groups from WeChat, sending an ominous signal about the future of queer activism that reverberated across the Chinese internet.
