According to news reports earlier this week, there’s evidently something of a crisis in China at the moment. The problem is that Chinese youngsters are struggling to form relationships and have even forgotten how to ask somebody out on a date. In response, dating classes have been set up where youngsters attend, sometimes accompanied by their parents, in the hope of finding romance. I know, it’s pretty hard to believe. Boy meets girl and, summoning up a bit of nerve, asks her if she would like to accompany him to the cinema, concert, pub, football match. Anything would do, it’s just a case of using your imagination.

Try as many lines as you can with as many girls as you can, nine may turn you down but the tenth time could be lucky and you’ve pulled! Well, that’s how I remember it anyway.  Who knows nowadays though? Things have changed so much and the art of conversation seems to be dying, so obsessed are kids with texting, playing with their smart-phones, laptops, ipods, ipads, x-boxes and goodness knows what else. Frankly, they haven’t got the time to bother with practicing and developing their social skills, hence the rise of internet dating, I suppose.

In China, I suspect it’s something rather different. Seventy years of stifling Communist rule and propaganda, the universal wearing of brown overalls, classroom worship of the Party and the showing of obeisance to some chubby little bald-headed bloke with a red star on his smock have undoubtedly had a detrimental effect on the normal development of Chinese children.

I wonder though, can it really be as bad as all that. Have the Chinese somehow lost the ability to love? Have they lost the natural and normal attraction that exists and has always existed between the sexes? Well, according to the last world census, there are now over one billion Chinese world-wide so the little blighters must be doing something right!