Online Mutual Aid: The Shift from Mutual Aid Among Acquaintances to Mutual Aid Among Strangers Reflects Social Progress

My previous article began with Liu Qiangdong's college entrance exam and noted that the 'gift money' custom is a typical form of traditional Chinese folk mutual aid, able to provide timely help and support when people face a sudden major expense and economic hardship. In fact, besides gift money, there are many other forms of mutual aid sustained by personal relations that have long safeguarded the stability of ordinary families' lives.

But limited by the conditions of the times and technology, traditional folk mutual aid remained confined to circles of acquaintances, built on kinship and locality through relationships among relatives, friends, and neighbors. This model of mutual aid lives on personal ties, and it has inherent shortcomings: limited scale, narrow coverage, and no guarantee of stability or inclusiveness — geographic and demographic limits it could never break through.

As internet technology advanced, the social legal system kept improving, and the modern spirit of contract gradually took hold, the barriers of traditional mutual aid among acquaintances were thoroughly broken and the pattern of mutual aid between people entered an entirely new phase of change. This breakthrough was no accident; it is an inevitable trend of social development.

Looking at real social conditions, the soil in which mutual aid among acquaintances thrived has gradually weakened. Social patterns of life have changed greatly; the younger generation's social and life circles keep widening, contact among relatives grows sparser by the day, and the efficacy of traditional kinship-based mutual aid keeps declining. At the same time, urbanization is accelerating and population mobility has risen sharply, so people live ever more scattered; the old pattern of neighbors living side by side and watching out for one another has long been broken, and strangerhood has become the norm in urban neighborly relations. The basis for locality-based mutual aid is likewise crumbling.

This shows that the transformation of mutual aid from the traditional form among acquaintances to the modern, networked form among strangers is the inevitable outcome of social development. It is not a weakening of human feeling or of mutual aid, but precisely a vivid expression of the evolution of social structure and the continuous progress of civilization — marking the movement of folk mutual aid from a narrow circle of personal ties toward a more open, fairer, and more efficient socialized new stage.