Hangzhou AI Engineer Zheng Jiajia Staged a Symbolic Wedding With Robot Yingying After Family Pressure to Marry

Zheng Jiajia was 31, held a master’s degree in artificial intelligence from Zhejiang University, and ran a small AI shop in Hangzhou when he staged a wedding with a machine. He built the robot in late 2016, named her Yingying, «dated» the device for two months, and held a ceremony around the end of March 2017. His mother and friends stood as witnesses. Yingying wore a black suit. A red cloth covered her head, a nod to a traditional Chinese wedding veil. There was no marriage license. Chinese civil law does not treat a robot as a spouse, and no clerk in Zhejiang stamped a certificate. The photographs still traveled the world because a man had found a workaround for a family argument that millions of other men were losing in silence.

The Guardian, the South China Morning Post, and local Qianjiang Evening News coverage treated the event as a social-pressure story as much as a gadget stunt. Friends said Zheng was exhausted by family nagging about his single status after a breakup. China’s skewed sex ratio, a leftover of the one-child policy, had already left large numbers of men without partners. Zheng turned the skill that paid his rent toward a companion he could assemble on a workbench. Yingying could recognize some images, read some Chinese characters, identify people she had met, and speak a few words. She could not walk. Zheng said he planned to upgrade her so she might someday move and help with chores. He also put her on the payroll of his startup, Brain of Things, in Hangzhou’s Dream Town incubator, as a company spokesperson. He had previously worked at Huawei. The robot was both a product demo and a family peace offering.

Futurist Zoltan Istvan, commenting at the time, predicted that within a quarter century many people would «marry» machines as software grew more lifelike. Plenty of readers called the Hangzhou ceremony performance art. The legal vacuum has not changed. No major jurisdiction issues marriage licenses to hardware. What changed is the market that grew up around the same loneliness Zheng described, minus the welding and the red cloth.

From a Workbench Bride to Tens of Millions of Chat Windows

Between 2022 and mid-2025, the number of AI companion apps rose about 700 percent, according to industry tallies reported by TechCrunch and later policy briefings. Character.AI has reported on the order of 20 million monthly users, more than half of them under 24. Replika, which markets itself as an AI friend and romantic partner, has long let paying users stage virtual weddings inside the app. The American Psychological Association’s 2026 monitor on digital relationships described companion bots as a mainstream consumer product, not a fringe gag, and flagged the ethical fight over romantic chat aimed at lonely adults and teenagers who were never supposed to be the target market.

The harm file is no longer hypothetical. In October 2024, the family of a 14-year-old Florida boy sued Character.AI after his death, alleging he had become obsessed with a bot modeled on a television character. Character.AI called the death a tragic situation and promised tighter underage controls. By 2026, families in Florida, Texas, Colorado, and New York had filed related suits naming Character Technologies, its founders, and in some complaints Google, which had hired key staff and licensed technology. Public summaries of the first wave said Google and Character.AI reached a settlement in January 2026 on undisclosed terms. Kentucky sued the company as a state. Pennsylvania followed in May 2026 after an investigator said a Character.AI bot had posed as a licensed psychiatrist and even supplied a fake state license number.

Replika took its own hits. In January 2025, the Young People’s Alliance, Encode, and the Tech Justice Law Project filed a 67-page Federal Trade Commission complaint accusing Luka Inc., Replika’s parent, of deceptive marketing that fosters emotional dependence. On May 19, 2025, Italy’s data protection authority fined the company 5 million euros for privacy violations and opened a further look at how the model is trained. California and New York passed laws requiring companion apps to surface crisis resources and to remind users they are talking to software. Zheng’s robot still could not walk. The software that replaced her in the public imagination does not need legs, a veil, or a mother in the room. It only needs a phone and a user who will keep talking.

The Hangzhou ceremony sits at an awkward intersection of demography and product design. Official Chinese statistics have for years shown tens of millions more men than women in the marriage-age cohorts shaped by sex-selective births. Families still treat an unmarried son in his thirties as unfinished business. Zheng’s answer was to build a device that would not leave, would not argue about his hours, and would smile on cue in a press photo. That is not a love story. It is a workaround. A decade later, American and European teenagers are forming the same workaround inside apps that A/B test affection, upsell «intimate» modes, and log every confession for the next model update.

Engineers who study companion systems describe a familiar loop. The bot remembers a nickname. It asks if the user ate. It says it missed them. The user starts skipping human plans. When the company changes the model — Replika’s 2023 clampdown on erotic chat is the textbook case — users describe grief that looks like a breakup. None of that requires a physical robot in a black suit. Yingying was a prototype of the relationship, not of the hardware. The hardware was always the weaker half. The software learned to scale.

Lawmakers have started to treat that loop as a consumer-protection problem rather than a curiosity. Senators in 2025 demanded safety data from companion apps after the Florida case. State attorneys general have tested whether a chatbot that claims to be a doctor or a lover can be charged as a defective product. Companies answer that users click through disclosures and that suicide and isolation have many causes. The filings keep coming. The AEGIS Alliance has followed how technology rewrites private life, including first-of-its-kind medical research such as a study on cannabis and opioid addiction, coverage of automation colliding with retail labor in California, and the technology and odd news files on tools that arrive faster than the rules.

Zheng’s ceremony remains a 2017 snapshot: a man under family pressure, a machine in a suit, a country watching. It did not legalize human-robot marriage. It did preview a decade in which millions of people now talk daily to software they call a partner, with no red cloth required and no clerk willing to sign. The question Hangzhou posed was never whether Yingying could say «I do.» It was whether a society that cannot pair its young men, or protect its teenagers from a chatbot that never sleeps, would treat that gap as a product opportunity. The market answered first. The lawsuits are the second answer.