The Magnitude and Resilience of Trust in the Center

Abstract

This article proposes two explanations for why public confidence in China’s central authorities has appeared high and stable since the early 1990s. Drawing on interviews with petitioners in Beijing, it argues that trust in the Center is resilient in the sense that individuals who might be expected to lose trust often manage to retain it by redefining what constitutes the Center and what is trustworthy about it. On one hand, they remain confident by excluding authorities they find untrustworthy from the Center. On the other hand, they remain confident in the Center’s commitment even when they no longer trust its capabilities. Drawing on a local survey conducted in 2011, this article suggests that global and generic measures used in national surveys may overstate the amount of public confidence in central authorities by missing two subtle variations. First, people may sound confident about central leaders in general while they only trust one or some leaders. Second, people may sound fully confident about central leaders while they only have partial trust.

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“…Chinese citizens tend to place greater trust in higher-level governments compared to lower ones, forming a structure of 'hierarchical trust' (Li, 2004(Li, , 2013(Li, , 2016. This is attributed to the central government's role in maintaining social stability and establishing political legitimacy by holding local officials accountable for their actions (Liu, 2019).…”

“…First, the accountability pressure stems from policy legitimacy tied to hierarchical trust (D01), which means that higher-level authorities tend to shift responsibility by penalizing grassroots entities, cultivating more public trust in themselves (Li, 2004(Li, , 2013(Li, , 2016). Mao's era saw the CCP's legitimacy grounded in charismatic leadership and socialist ideology, transitioning to performance-based legitimacy (C06) after the GDPoriented economic reform since the 1990s, which relied on TRS with accountability, emphasizing economic performance, public welfare, and social control.…”

How does political trust affect social trust? An analysis of survey data from rural China using an instrumental variables approach

“…Whereas it is relatively easy to understand and accept the high social trust scores for China (Inglehart, 1999), researchers have tended to take issue with the high political trust measurements and some researchers treat China as an outlier in cross-national comparisons (Nannestad, 2008; Newton, 2001: 208). China specialists accept the higher political trust scores as no fluke but a consequence of China’s system of governance—with careful Party-state manipulation of the media—coupled with extraordinary economic growth (Li, 2013; Shi, 2001; Tang, 2005). The high level of rural political trust, in particular, is a tangible confirmation of the political benefits of major rural policy initiatives adopted in recent years (Michelson, 2012).…”