Chinese social media spiked its attention over the new boyfriend of Wendi Deng, the 48-year-old former wife of Rupert Murdoch. Deng's new beau is a 21-year-old Austrian model.
Many Chinese women are drawing attention to Wendi Deng and are aspiring to be like her. The news on her new boyfriend triggered 20,000 comments and 93,000 likes on Weibo.
"My parents told me I would become a leftover if I didn't get married before 30," one female blogger said. "But look at Deng! As a middle-aged mother with two daughters, she is still attractive to handsome young men."
Wendi was born in Shandong in 1968 and went to Guangzhou Medical College. Her marriage to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch was the second and was widely criticized.
Rumors circulated that she was being a "gold digger" and schemed her way up the Western social ladder by marrying wealthy old men. She was a manager at Star TV in Hong Kong when she met Murdoch.
In her early years of marriage to Murdoch, she was regarded as a supportive wife. Celebrity website fusion.com described it as, "For the first years of their marriage Deng was painted as the lovely housewife, a quaint village beauty who only had, like, ten pairs of shoes."
She, later on, helped Murdoch in his businesses and brokered deals in China that were worth millions of dollars.
Deng and many single, older Chinese women are divorcing and getting into relationships with younger men in modern China.
Another older woman, 43-year-old actress Li Bingbing disclosed her relationship with a man 16 years her junior.
The same is also true with actresses Gao Yuanyuan, Ruby Lin and Michelle Chen.