The Story of a Whole Village Chipping In to Send Liu Qiangdong to University Makes 'Online Mutual Aid' Suddenly Clear

As the annual college entrance exam approaches, I cannot help recalling a widely told story: when Liu Qiangdong got into university, it was his whole village that pooled 500 yuan and 76 eggs to send him to Beijing, and after achieving success he gave back to his hometown and its people. This story is a vivid embodiment of the value of traditional gift money.

In Chinese society, gift money is part of every major occasion — weddings and funerals, births and birthdays, housewarmings and graduations, visiting the sick. This custom, passed down for centuries, is rooted in the Chinese people's wisdom of mutual help and is an important bond sustaining personal relationships.

Traditional gift money has distinct features:

First, it is entirely voluntary, with no compulsion;

Second, what you give and what you get are not equivalent obligations — what you pay out does not necessarily return in equal measure;

Third, it operates by folk convention and custom, without any legally binding force.

Although many people may feel that giving gift money has become a burden on personal relations, it undeniably has real positive value. When major events strike — a serious illness, a misfortune, a large payment due — many families urgently need a sum of money to tide them over. Even if the personal obligation eventually circulates back in the form of a return gift, this pattern of mutual help can still carry people through a critical moment.

Understanding online mutual aid in light of this folk custom and its methods and aims, it is easy to see that online mutual aid's distinctive features closely match these characteristics of gift money. Online mutual aid is essentially an internet-era upgrade of traditional gift money. The two share one continuous core logic: people join hands to extend help when others meet economic hardship, and when they fall into difficulty themselves, they too receive the support of the group.

Moreover, compared with traditional gift money, online mutual aid represents a major upgrade: it breaks through the original limits of acquaintances. In the traditional agrarian age, people lived together generation after generation, with fixed circles of relatives, friends, and neighbors, and gift money operated naturally on the basis of locality and kinship. Today, with population mobility intensifying, those circles of acquaintances have been broken — yet people's need to seek help for large, sudden expenses has never disappeared. Using the internet as its vehicle, online mutual aid breaks down the barriers of geography and acquaintance relationships, allowing total strangers to build a mutual aid community of their own.

This goodwill and assistance benefits more than individuals. Extending a hand to help the unfortunate through difficulty both defuses crises for individuals and families and reduces potential social problems; it may also help people in hardship regain hope and create value and contribute to society — such is the unique social significance of online mutual aid.

Although Liu Qiangdong's story shows an extreme case of someone giving back to his village after success, among the many families that online mutual aid has helped, who is to say that a few more Liu Qiangdongs will not emerge in the future?