For over a decade, Zhang Mading has written, practiced and reflected on online mutual aid and KangAi Commune. His core thinking is not merely about arguing "whether online mutual aid has value", but about exploring a more fundamental question:
In the modern world, can people use the internet to build, at low cost, a long-term, transparent and rule-based community of mutual aid among strangers?
His main views can be summarized in the following eight aspects.
What KangAi Commune is really exploring is not a cheaper form of insurance, but whether — in the internet age — strangers can rely on rules, transparency and long-term commitment to build a community that shares risk together.
Insurance, public health insurance, charity and online mutual aid all address risk protection to varying degrees, but through different mechanisms.
The simplest logic of online mutual aid is:
One person's strength is small; a group's strength is great. People who do not know who will face a risk agree in advance: when one of them meets the agreed risk, the others help together.
The internet did not invent mutual aid. Neighborly, clan and industry mutual aid have existed in human society for thousands of years. What the internet truly changed is that, for the first time, it made low-cost mutual aid among strangers at scale possible.
Therefore, online mutual aid is not a marketing product that happens to appear in the internet age, but a new organizational form of traditional mutual aid empowered by the internet.
The basic model of commercial insurance is to collect premiums first, form a capital pool, and then have the insurer bear the contractual indemnity obligation.
Online mutual aid can take another path:
No large reserve fund is pooled in advance; after a risk event occurs, participants share the cost according to a prior agreement.
This is why KangAi Commune has long insisted on "zero prepayment, post-event cost-sharing."
This model voluntarily gives up the capital pool, investment income and rigid indemnity — important financial attributes of modern insurance — reducing the protection mechanism as much as possible to a simple social mutual-assistance relationship.
In this sense, online mutual aid can be understood as:
A primitive yet modern mutual-aid protection mechanism reactivated by the internet.
It has a risk-sharing function similar to insurance, yet does not have to become insurance.
Charity is more like:
"I am willing to help you."
Mutual aid is:
"We agree to help each other."
Joining a mutual-aid community means holding two identities at once: the person who helps others, and the person who may be helped by others in the future.
Therefore, mutual aid cannot run on goodwill alone.
Waiting periods, health requirements, mutual-aid conditions, contribution obligations and review systems may sometimes seem cold, but they are the foundation of long-term cooperation among strangers.
The truly difficult part lies precisely here:
Mutual aid needs warmth, but rules must not be broken by personal favor; it needs goodwill, but the system cannot be sustained by goodwill alone.
Helping someone easily wins applause; refusing someone who is sympathetic but does not meet the rules is very difficult. Yet if rules are repeatedly broken out of sympathy, the ultimate victims are all who follow the rules.
So fairness is not an accessory of mutual aid, but the lifeline of its long-term existence.
Low barriers and post-event cost-sharing are the strengths of online mutual aid, and also its natural weaknesses.
If the cost of joining is extremely low, a person may neglect mutual aid while healthy and only join when risk is already apparent; they may hope for strict rules when helping others, yet lenient rules when applying for aid themselves.
Therefore, online mutual aid cannot be built on the assumption that "everyone will act conscientiously."
Health requirements, waiting periods, risk stratification, strict review and necessary default costs all essentially solve one problem:
Protecting those who keep their promises over the long term, and not letting rule-abiding people pay for opportunists.
KangAi Commune's multiple mutual-aid communities and risk stratification are also designed to control adverse selection and risk mismatch.
The so-called "death spiral" is not an unchangeable fate of online mutual aid, but a risk that institutional design must face and manage over the long term.
Online mutual aid should not only pursue "cheapness"; more importantly, it should pursue:
How much of every dollar participants pay truly goes to helping those who face risk.
By not pooling large sums in advance, not making complex investments, and not bearing a huge sales system and fund-management costs — using the internet to complete notification, cost-sharing, review, disclosure and oversight — the organizational cost of protection can be compressed to a relatively low level.
At the same time, post-event cost-sharing means that before a risk occurs, the money stays in participants' own hands.
Therefore, what KangAi Commune pursues is not building an ever-larger financial institution, but striving to build:
A protection collaboration network with as light an organization as possible, as short a fund path as possible, and as transparent a system as possible.
If this model one day loses its efficiency advantage, it will also lose the economic reason to persist.
KangAi Commune should never be a person's entire protection.
Public health insurance addresses basic medical protection, commercial insurance provides contractual and relatively certain protection, social assistance and charity address other social problems, and online mutual aid can provide a low-barrier, low-cost, socialized supplementary protection.
A truly reasonable protection system is not about finding one system to solve all problems, but:
Diverse mutual assistance, layered protection.
Therefore, it is good for society that public health insurance keeps improving and commercial insurance keeps getting cheaper.
What mutual aid really needs to answer is not "how to replace insurance", but:
Beyond public health insurance and insurance, what unique value can we still create?
If online mutual aid merely collected money from a group's accounts and transferred it to another person, it would ultimately only be compared with insurance on price.
But mutual aid has another possibility.
Members can know whom they helped, see how funds flow, understand why a case was approved or rejected, oversee the platform, participate in adjudication, propose rule changes, and even take part in community governance.
In this way, a person is no longer just a "consumer."
They are simultaneously:
A participant, a helper, an overseer, a co-author of rules, and a potential recipient of aid.
This may be the most worthwhile thing about online mutual aid that distinguishes it from traditional financial protection.
Protection is therefore no longer just a contract, but a social connection between people that can be seen, felt and participated in.
In the future, KangAi Commune should make transparency, participation and co-governance gradually more important than low price as a competitive advantage.
KangAi Commune has proposed the "Century Commune" since its founding.
"Century" does not predict that a company can operate for a hundred years, but is a principle of institutional design:
Decisions made today must not consider only how many users or how much revenue they bring today, but whether the system can still run ten or several decades later.
Therefore, KangAi Commune has voluntarily restrained expansion, insisted on strict review, refused to break rules easily, and kept revising systems that practice proved problematic.
Over a decade of practice has also made us increasingly realize that mutual aid is an extremely difficult thing.
When healthy, people easily feel it is dispensable; when actually facing illness, they hope for as much help as possible. When helping others, they hope for strict enforcement; when it is their own turn, they naturally hope for leniency.
So what online mutual aid truly needs to solve has never been just technical and financial problems.
It ultimately faces an ancient question:
How do a group of strangers, whose interests are not entirely aligned, build trust, make rules, constrain one another, and cooperate over the long term?
KangAi Commune's decade-plus of practice is essentially a long-term social experiment on this question.
Whether it ultimately succeeds should not be judged only by how many people it has helped, how much money it has raised, or how many members it has.
More importantly:
Have we proved that, in the internet age, a group of strangers can still rely on open and transparent rules to build trust, keep their promises over the long term, and help each other in times of difficulty.
If this can be achieved, the significance of KangAi Commune is not merely a critical-illness protection method.
It is also an exploration of how people in the internet age can rebuild connection, trust and community.