CEO of Chinese Crowdfunding Platform Shuidichou Apologizes for the Company’s Misconduct

Shen Peng, founder and CEO of Shuidichou, a Chinese medical treatment crowdfunding platform, apologized on Weibo for the company’s aggressive tactics to promote its services in hospitals.

“If I still can’t manage Shuidichou well, I am willing to hand the organization over to related public service organizations,” he wrote.

The announcement came in response to online criticism against the company dispatching employees to hospitals all over the country to open crowdfunding campaigns on the platform. The employees even made up the amount of money patients and their relatives wanted to raise, not to mention the company didn’t run any background checks, as reported by Pear Video on November 30.

“[The company] will pay for 100 yuan ($14) per campaign if you helped launch six to ten campaigns. I earned 14,000 yuan ($1990) last month,” said one Shuidichou offline service provider.

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The company said they had suspended such services in a post the same day. And they apologized for their behavior two days later, saying that the management level would take related responsibilities.

Shuidichou was founded in 2016 by Shen, who co-founded Meituan Dianping’s food delivery business. “We founded the offline service team to help poor patients who may not be good at launching fundraising campaigns online, and we have hundreds of them right now. People criticized the team for this incident because they broke the rules to get a bonus,” Shen said.

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