好心却成灾

LW: And a Wall of Kindness has run into trouble. Now, Nick, not all of us will be familiar with this phenomenon, necessarily. Can you maybe elaborate on what exactly a Wall of Kindness is? NL: Of course. LW: And why a Wall of Kindness is running into some trouble? NL: Well, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that not everyone is familiar with a Wall of Kindness, I wasn’t familiar with it myself, and it’s quite a new thing. It’s a designated wall, somewhere in a city – usually a wall, hence the name Wall of Kindness, but it can be another place as well – where people can donate their unwanted items of clothing by hanging them on the wall. So there are hooks or pegs on the wall, where you can hang up your old clothes that you don’t need any more, and those clothes are then free for anyone in need – a homeless person, someone who can’t afford to buy new clothes – to come along and take what they need. And the motto is “If you don’t need it, leave it. If you do need it, take it”. The first Wall of Kindness appeared last year in Iran, in response to a worsening social situation there – many people had become homeless, and the winter was coming, they have very cold winters – and in order to provide people who were without clothing or heating to keep themselves warm. People donated their old clothes that they didn’t need any more and the idea has spread; so, via social media, people post photos of their walls, a lot of them have got decorations and paintings on the wall, it looks like a real focal point that you can come and carry out an act of charity. So, the idea has now spread to Pakistan and other countries, and it’s also reached China – a number of cities in China. But, the Wall of Kindness in Kunming, in Yunnan Province, was closed down a few days ago, just ten days after it was opened, because the authorities were receiving complaints that there were just so many clothes being dumped at this wall that they were literally blocking the street. People couldn’t get past, people were complaining that it just looked like a rubbish dump rather than a charity point, and the clothes were all cleared away. TY: One thing not so good is what you’ve mentioned already about turning the whole thing into some sort of dumpster. And one question I’m wondering is, why do we see good things turning bad, or ugly, or at least undesirable after they are adopted in China? I’m not saying it happens every day, or to everything, but you can see it every now and then. Say, I think Lincoln will be familiar with this idea, the circuit breaker mechanism. It was introduced to prevent sharp falls on the stock market but it turned out to be something checking the liquidity on the Chinese bourses and was eventually suspended. Probably it’s because it doesn’t fit the so-called “environment with Chinese characteristics”, but in this case, the Wall of Kindness, I think it’s just some good personality traits that we lack under certain circumstances. LW: But maybe educate a little bit more. TY: Yeah. LW: Maybe, you know, give out information, as it were. NL: I think it’s important to note, as well, that not all of the Walls of Kindness have met this fate. LW: Thank you! Thank you, Nick, for stepping in. NL: There have been walls that are still running successfully, there’s one in Zhengzhou, there’s one in Qingdao, and those ones seem not to have run into the same kinds of problems as the others. TY: That’s good. NL: So perhaps it just depends, as we’ve said, on how much people know about it in the given city. LW: Yeah, it’s also very individual, there’s no way of exactly knowing how these things will work out. But hopefully we will see more Kindness Walls standing up and providing a really important service, it seems. It’s a good thing in the world, so if we can keep it going for as long as possible, I think that would be great.