The practice of matchmaking holds a longstanding tradition, as a popular way to arrange matches between intimate and romantic partners, also to secure courtships and other interpersonal arrangements (Wollburg, 2016). Across a wide range of cultural and sociopolitical contexts, matchmaking has been valued as a legitimate profession as it involves labor, work, and always remuneration (Li, 2010; Paramita, 2021) and vividly represents the longlasting commercialization of effective intimacy building (Li, 2010; Wollburg, 2016; Al-Dawood et al., 2021). Whilst the age of algorithmically impacted forms of intimacy (Wiehn, 2023, Wilson, 2016), the emergence of modern matchmaking - mobile dating applications (MDAs) showcase the effects of platformization. Much attention has been paid to MDAs from the economic and political perspective, their technological infrastructure, or focused on users(Solis & Wong, 2019; Chan,2021), but less work has been conducted on the digital and precarious labor that twins with platformization (Sun et al, 2021), in this case, in MDAs. The “productionconsumption continuum” indicates how labor relationships stemming from traditional matchmaking may have evolved within MDAs. Thus, with this paper, we ask in what ways MDAs essentially re-interpret the dated pattern of matchmaking in digital environments and shift the labor of matchmaking. Our analysis aims to elevate the new dynamics of labor, work, and market spheres of intimacy. Meanwhile, we underline the need to study MDAs’ role in concrete socio-cultural contexts, in this paper, the cultural context of urban China.Methodologically, the paper is embedded in digital anthropology with more than two years of work. Empirical data from both online spaces and offline spaces pertaining to the practice of matchmaking are included, to illustrate the labor work in-between tradition and platformization. This mixed-method approach includes the walkthrough of MDAs such as Tinder, Hinge, Soul, MoMo, TanTan, etc, public forums, participant observation of matchmaking activities in theprivate SNS tool WeChat, furthermore, participant observation of one classical form of matchmaking. A matchmaking park in Xi’an, mainland China, is chosen for its cultural accessibility and meaning for the cultural practice of matchmaking in the pan-Asian cultural sphere. 30 in-depth interviews are conducted all together. With this paper, we aim to coin a new labor of matchmaking that unfolds in the interplay of traditional cultural matchmaking practices in the concrete social-cultural context of China and platformized infrastructures for dating.

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