This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the development of rural mutual aid elderly care in China, highlighting it as both a “Chinese path” to address population aging and a potential model for global reference. It outlines the policy foundations, practical imperatives, and real-world significance of this care model, tracing its historical evolution through five stages—from kinship-based aid to mutual aid elderly care communities. The chapter also reviews academic research on its current status, influencing factors, implementation pathways, and typical models, identifying a lack of typological analysis in existing literature. In response, this book adopts a typological approach to categorize four major practice models—government led, organization guided, grassroots initiated, and market participation—offering insights into their operational mechanisms and governance strategies. This lays the groundwork for proposing locally grounded yet globally relevant solutions to the challenges of rural elderly care.