What do Chinese Young People Love Nowadays? Fortune Telling

You may be surprised to learn that fortune telling is very popular among young Chinese people right now. You may think that young Chinese people probably don’t believe in such a thing, but on the contrary, they are curious about it and some of them actually pay for fortune-telling. 

According to a poll published by 36Kr, 80% of participants say they have done fortune-telling before (either online or offline) and 90% of them “learn their life path” online. They want to know whether marrying this guy is a right thing to do, whether it is a good year for them to get married, whether it is a good year for the wife to give birth to a baby. 

Actually, in China, fortune telling is a common thing especially for the older generation. It appears young people are influenced by the older generation in some unexpected ways.

What Are Young People Looking For in Fortune Telling?

The most popular type of fortune telling is Bazi (八字). In China, it is believed that everyone is born with a series of words. These words are based on the time and date you are born and can tell you about your life. 

Following this, the next most popular is horoscopes and zodiac signs, and then Tarot. There are other formats such as providing your name, looking at your face or hand, or even your numbers, such as QQ numbers, WeChat numbers, phone numbers etc.

For people who are under 18, they most frequently ask questions about their studies, followed by relationships. And for people aged between 19 to 30, relationships are the most popular topic, followed by careers.

The Business of Fortune Telling

According to 36Kr’s poll, over half of the participants are willing to spend money for fortune telling, with prices ranging from 50 to 100 RMB, and there are people who are happy to spend over 1,000 RMB to learn about their own lives.

When it comes to offline fortune telling, in most cases, it doesn’t have a set price. The amount of money is often decided by customers. For online fortune telling, users are often presented with a brief report about their life path, and if they want to dig into more details such as their relationship, their career or their future family, they will have to spend extra money on it.

On ecommerce platforms, there are many fortune telling stores. The price that they charge ranges from 30 to 2,000 RMB. On Taobao, a most popular store has 50k orders every month. With the average price of 50 RMB, in total, it has at least 1.5M RMB revenue.

Fortune Telling Apps

Cha Bazi 查八字

This is a fortune telling app using traditional Chinese calendars. Users can enter their date of birth, name and other information to obtain a fortune report on their future. Couples can enter both of their names and personal information to find out about the future of their marriage. It costs 40 RMB for a full report.

Master Ziwei 紫薇大师

This is a fortune telling app that uses traditional Chinese lunar calendar and the user’s personal information such as date of birth and name to predict the user’s future as well as other information, for example it will tell you how your Qi is every day. 

The app has a membership fee as well as an online store selling products that will “bring you good fortune.”

Curiosity Lab

This is an interesting fortune telling app using photographs, palm reading, quizzes, etc., to generate fortune reports for users to avoid ads and get more detailed reports, users must subscribe for $7.49/week or $22.99/month.

Horoscope Influencers

Besides online fortune telling apps and offline fortune tellers, there are plenty of KOLs in China sharing horoscope predictions. Probably the most famous one is Alex是大叔, who has almost 18 million followers on Weibo and his WeChat articles regularly get over 100K views. Alex publishes daily content related to horoscopes and also has a lot of videos explaining how to date people based on their horoscope sign. 

This past summer he was one of the celebrity hosts on the reality dating show “心动的信号3“ using horoscopes to explain the relationships and actions of the show’s participants.

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