Did Rapid Modernization Destroy Social Trust in China?

Theorists have long disagreed over the impact of socio-economic modernization on social trust. Optimists claim that it boosts economic security and broadens people’s outlooks, thereby enhancing trust. A pessimistic school, by contrast, argues that modernization brings about insecurity and anonymity, leading to rampant distrust and social apathy. Reflecting on apparently increasing indications for social strain, Chinese social scientists have largely followed the pessimistic narrative and diagnosed a modernization-induced deepening crisis of trust in China. Displaying strong variation in socio-economic development, while being endowed with the same political institutions and a common cultural heritage, a comparison of Chinese regions provides a quasi-experimental setting for testing these claims. Hence, this paper combines individual level survey data from the World Values Survey with a wide range of fiscal, economic, education and population statistics from 61 Chinese county-level units. It investigates within a multi-level framework the – positive or negative – impact modernization has on levels of trust in out-groups (strangers, people with a different religion, foreigners) and trust in in-groups (family, neighbors, friends). We find that both socio-structural modernization (social mobility, urbanization, individualization) as well as human empowerment/existential security (welfare, knowledge, wealth) increase trust in out-groups. Knowledge and particularly wealth emerge as the dominating predictors. By contrast, trust in in-groups, except for a positive effect of individualization, is essentially unaffected by these modernization processes. The study thus offers three main insights: first, the findings provide strong support for the optimistic view on modernization, suggesting that its net effect on social trust is positive. Human empowerment and existential security gains are key to generating out-group trust in a transitional society. Further supporting this picture, data suggests that out-group trust in China has indeed increased over time. Second, the results also point to some limits of a cultural theory of social trust. Rather than being stuck in a culturally-determined narrow radius of trust, socio-economic progress evidentially promotes trust that reaches beyond the circle of in-groups. Third, anecdotal evidence on increasing social anomie in China may not be the outcome of declining trust, but rather the result of a gap between patterns of trust that have not yet fully caught up with a profoundly transformed socio-economic structure.