'It's not like a college'

China's "pickup artists" first formed a "seduction community" in 2008, when amateur PUAs began gathering on online forums, but it wasn't until 2010, when Southern Weekend published a two-page feature detailing their activities, that the phenomenon attracted widespread attention.

In 2010, Wu Jiamin became the first PUA to offer workshops teaching the art of seduction on paoxue, the country's largest PUA forum at the time.

A protege of Wayne "Juggler" Elise, a well-known streetwise PUA in the United States, Wu said his life changed forever when he read the bestseller The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss, a journalist and ghostwriter in the US.