Those Hostile to Online Mutual Aid Still Haven't Grasped the Spirit of Mutual Aid

Take gift money, for instance—everyone knows it. When a family has a wedding or a funeral, relatives and friends send some money, expressing their good wishes while raising funds for the occasion.

It is a form of social interaction, and there is nothing very compulsory about it. Everyone knows in their hearts that if such a thing happened to them, others would give them money too—and even if a few people didn't, it wouldn't matter. It's all fine.

It is half social, half charitable, with a touch of financial circulation.

But viewed by some insurance professionals, such a thing is riddled with holes and has no reason to exist. They would say: if we insurers developed an insurance product, it could achieve a more precise effect with more binding force.

In reality, though, you simply cannot do it. No matter how good the effect, it cannot replace this tradition.

What KangAi Commune and other online mutual aid platforms do is essentially this very thing. If people insist on slapping the label of "insurance" on it, that is not necessarily the goal we intend to achieve.

Mr. Wang Yizhong, a former teacher at the insurance regulator, once told me something that left a deep impression.

There was a village in Shandong that made firecrackers. Because the business was so dangerous, whenever an accident happened a family's breadwinner would be taken by the explosion. So the village developed a tradition: when a family suffered such a loss, the whole village would care for its children and elderly, so that everyone could go about their work with a little more peace of mind.

Would you call that insurance?

Online mutual aid is nothing more than moving that village model onto the internet.

Don't stick labels on things.

When society's various protection programs are working well, we will happily die off at once.

As for Xianghubao, the problem is that it wants to elevate itself into a strict insurance product, so it ran into rigorous professional scrutiny from insurance elites; there is a reasonable element in the insurance industry's rejection of it. But if the colleagues at Xianghubao stepped outside of insurance and thought more about the story of that village above, I believe greater achievements lie ahead.

Not doing insurance won't kill you; losing your original purpose will.