The growing popularity of online gay-friendly adverts in China shows business is waking up to the ‘pink yuan’ and more liberal attitudes among young people but the government remains unmoved. China’s gay economy is worth $300 billion to $500 billion annually, reaching some 70 million people, according to Daxue Consulting, a market research firm – making it the biggest gay and transgender market in the world in terms of population. “Young Chinese people do appear to be opening up and accepting LGBT+ culture,” Allison Malmsten, China analyst at the Shanghai-based company, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “The LGBT+ market in China has a lot of untapped potential.” Homosexuality has been legal in China since 1997 and the country’s largest organisation for psychiatrists stopped classifying it as a mental disorder in 2001.