From the shutdown of Tianya Community: why we should think about separating KangAi Commune from its operating entity

Tianya Community is one of China's best-known online communities, and its shutdown leaves a heavy warning: when the community, the data, the funds and the licences are all bound to a single operating company, the company's debts and business crisis turn directly into a life-or-death crisis for the whole community. A company can fall, but the trust users place in a community ought not to be extinguished with it.

Set against KangAi Commune, this warning carries even more weight. The Commune is not merely a discussion forum: it carries the mutual-aid agreements among members, the trust that underpins risk-sharing, and the rights and interests established through adjudication. If we continue with the conventional platform model, with the fate of the community deeply tied to the operating company, Tianya's predicament is a risk we too must face squarely.

From this we have arrived at a direction to explore: trying to separate the mutual-aid community from the operating entity. It can be compared to the relationship between homeowners in a residential compound and the property management company: the members are the homeowners, and the mutual-aid rules, the adjudication mechanism and the members' rights system belong to the community of all members; the operating entity is merely a commissioned service provider, responsible for systems, operations and maintenance, customer service and similar matters, and charging a service fee as agreed. The service provider can be replaced and the contract can be terminated, while the shared foundation of mutual aid among members, we hope, can continue.

But we are clear that this is only a direction for thinking; putting it into practice faces multiple practical obstacles. The homeowner–property manager analogy is only a convenient narrative: the community of members has no statutory property rights to rely on, so rights of ownership, migration and takeover can rest only on the self-governance covenant and contractual arrangements, and the cost of proof to the outside world is high. Licences for an online platform can only be held by a specific legal person, and compliance responsibility for the platform is therefore bound to the service provider, making it hard to make it independent along with the community. Member records are sensitive personal information, and mutual-aid funds carry payment commitments; the segregation, custody and handover of both face strict compliance constraints. At the same time, self-governance mechanisms are themselves fragile: member participation, checks and balances in deliberation, and oversight of successive leadership all require long-term maintenance.

This article does not offer a mature solution. It merely draws on Tianya's example to raise a line of thinking: lasting mutual aid cannot depend on any single company operating forever. We hope to explore a relay-capable mechanism, one in which the operating entity becomes a replaceable link, and the mutual-aid agreements among members gain a capacity to survive beyond any single operator. There is no ready-made template for this path, and the difficulties are many, but it is worth continuing to explore.