Running KangAi Commune, I Never Expected to Turn Away So Many People — and It Is Not a Comfortable Process

The original purpose of founding KangAi Commune was simple: to help people.

We once thought that doing something to help people, even if it was hard work, would at least be relatively easy to understand. But once we actually began operating it, we found things were far more complicated than we had imagined.

Over the years we have helped many people, and for that very reason we have turned away many and offended many. Some are deeply dissatisfied with us, some complain relentlessly, and some even take the attitude that they “must bring you down.” None of this occurred to us when we started.

Later we gradually understood that the problem comes precisely from mutual aid itself.

Because mutual aid is not a charitable donation; it is a group of people, under rules agreed in advance, helping together those who qualify. Where there are rules, some people will necessarily qualify, and some necessarily will not.

When a family is struck by illness and hardship and applies to us for mutual aid, of course we understand how much they long for that money. But if they do not meet the covenant, we still have to say no.

And that “no,” for the platform, may be merely the enforcement of a rule; for the person asking for help, it may mean the difference of hundreds of thousands of yuan. From their standpoint, disappointment, anger and even resentment are not hard to understand.

But if we broke the rules out of sympathy — making an exception for one person today — it would be very hard to refuse the next person tomorrow. In the end it might look like we had helped more people, when in fact we had destroyed the compact that all participants observe together. Once the rules lose their meaning, mutual aid itself cannot last long.

So we have come to feel more and more that the hardest part of running mutual aid is sometimes not helping one person, but holding to the rules while wanting to help.

We also need to reflect on ourselves. Can the rules be written more clearly? Can we make sure everyone truly understands them when they join? Can the review process be more transparent? When there is a dispute, can members take part in adjudicating it? For those we refuse, can we explain more patiently and with more humanity?

These are the things KangAi Commune should keep improving.

We do not presume that everyone we have refused will understand us, and we certainly do not believe the platform will never make mistakes. We only hope people will understand one basic fact:

Refusing some requests that do not meet the conditions is not the opposite of mutual aid — it is precisely part of upholding it.

What KangAi Commune wants to be is not an institution that can arbitrarily decide “who gets help and who does not,” but a mutual-aid community where everyone helps to make the rules, observes the rules together and helps one another.

The original intention of helping people has not changed.

Only now, having come this far, do we truly understand: for goodwill to last, goodwill alone is not enough. It also needs rules, fairness and transparency — and a little more mutual understanding.