Trust is an important form of social capital, it promotes the groups developing positively cooperation with each other, and has a closely relation with social economic development. Based on the data of China General Social Survey (CGSS) 2010, this article attempts to compare the difference of social trust structure between the urban and rural in China through three aspects: general trust, special trust and organizational trust. The result found out that the social networks and institutional environment of urban and rural are different, which leads to the development rate of social trust in the urban and rural is not synchronized, the rural residents’ trust level is higher than the city. And it seems that the city is apparently losing its own trust system to regulate people’s behavior and values while the whole society has the old and new trust system alternating. It is important to improve social trust of China, and establish a proper trust system for the modern economic development and social life. This article finally puts forward that we can improve institutional norm, popularize higher education and develop social autonomy organization to solve the problem.
Trust is not only a moral topic, but also the economic development issue, because that fact that people don’t trust each other will make a sharp increase in the transaction costs of cooperation, and hinder the social division of labor, which will affect the healthy development of a regional or national economy in the long term. Research on social trust had been beginning since the 1990s in China, scholars such as Yanjie Bian (1997) [
What is trust? Much has been written about the conceptual of trust from various disciplines perspective. Based on the previous researches, we conclude two mainstream views. On one side, trust is considered as a non-ra- tional human emotion, including cognitive, emotional and behavioral factors, the behavior being pinned will bring positive expectations, increase the willingness to take risks, scholars analyze from the psychological tendency of individual or collective (Qi Yao, Huawei Ma, 2003) [
Social network is constructed by some similar characteristics such as blood, geopolitical, occupation and interests together to reflect people’s social relationship in communication. And the dimensions of scale, density, homogeneity, heterogeneity, cohesion and closure properties affect the way people go to interaction and exchange. The open and inclusive social network can make different groups to establish contact, while groups have strong and exclusive heterogeneous correlation in the closed and dense social network, there are weak contact between groups (Hongyun Zhou, 2011) [
Social norms and institutions, in essence, is the social and cultural rules provide a system of mutual supervision for the production, exchange and distribution process. There are two kinds of views discussing how norms or institutions affect trust in the previous studies. One is the cultural determinism, cultural norms and values play important role on the formation of trust, it can promote or inhibit the development progress, affect the principal exposure to risk. What’s more, cultural tradition has the influence on trust in the process of social intergenerational transmission and social environment changed (Patricia M. Doney, Joseph P. Cannon, 1998 [
The formation and development of trust are formed and developed in a certain social network and institutional environment. Chinese society has a relative abundance of traditional social capital, especially in rural areas, but lack of modern social capital. There will be a long period of time that social capital exists with diverse characteristics simultaneously (Xiaodong Huang, 2011) [
The data in the study comes from the China General Social Survey (CGSS) 2010, the survey has 11,783 valid samples, involving residents in thirty-one provinces, autonomous regions and direct Municipality, 7222 samples of urban residents and 4561 samples of rural residents. The survey contains respondents’ demographic characteristics such as regional, provincial, residence, gender, education, political affiliation, income. The samples of women accounts for 51.8%, the male is 48.2%, in the political affiliation, Communist Party members accounted for 12.4%, non party membership is 87.6%. There are 13% respondents never received any education, primary accounted for 22.1%, 29.3% junior middle school, 12.8% high school(vocational high school and ordinary high school), 15.4% college and undergraduate degree or above. In this study, we select variable of individual income, education, political affiliation, gender to analyze the residents’ trust level. Economic income and education are considered to change individual’s social attitude and enhance the ability of defending social risks, the key factors promote social mobility and hierarchical. The identity of the Chinese Communist Party in China is considered to be a symbol of power and social status.
Based on previous studies of Yamagishi Toshio (1994) [
1) Comparison of urban and rural residents’ general trust
We use
According to Model 1, the Chinese’ general trust levels have association with individual economic income and education degree. In the regression equation, individual income has significant statistical significance to the general trust, the regression coefficient is −0.01, it shows that people with higher income tend to have lower trust level. On education factors, the group who have education only or less than primary school as the benchmark set, we can see the factor of education has a strong statistical significance on general trust. The effect of education shows aU-shape, group of primary school or less has the highest trust level in the investigation, the general trust of group of high school and technical secondary school is the least, and its regression coefficient is −0.639, the regression coefficient of group of college degree or more is −0.345. People received college education or more seem to more like to trust others, it suggests to strengthen the education degree of popularization has a positive impact on social trust.
Based on the Model 1, we join the variables of urban and rural into the regression equation, to form a new regression equation, Model 2 analyzes how the difference between urban and rural will impact general trust level. The data shows that the difference of urban and rural is highly correlated with general trust level in China, put the group of rural residents as a benchmark, the general trust of urban residents is fewer 0.486 per unit than rural area. It proves that people live in rural usually more like to trust others than live in urban. In previous studies, economy and education can enhance the risk affordability of individual in the society, so people will more dare to trust strangers, create the opportunities for cooperation and bear the losses caused by risky behavior. But in China, these two factors make people realize the social transaction mechanism is not perfect enough to protect their interest in the risk society, so they avoid to choosing risky behavior and trusting others easily. And this result the urban residents have less intention to trust others than the rural.
Model 1 | Model 2 | |
---|---|---|
Individual annual income | −0.010 (−3.202)** | −0.009 (−2.794)** |
Junior high school | −0.440 (−7.048)** | −0.341 (−5.375)** |
High school or Technical Secondary School | −0.639 (−8.993)** | −0.427 (−5.685)** |
College or University graduate | −0.345 (−3.202)** | −0.071 (−0.850) |
Urban & rural | −0.486 (−8.480)** | |
Constant term | 6.585 (157.153)** | 6.768 (143.955)** |
Note: 1. the values in brackets are T test, **P < 0.01, *P < 0.1; 2. Reference group: variable of education is the group of primary school or less, variable of urban& rural areas is the group of rural areas.
2) The social network and particular trust of urban and rural residents
We put the average of all kind of interpersonal trust into rotation factor analysis, get two factors and classified them as affective trust and cognitive trust, the former including family members, relatives and friends, based on kinship or close emotional, these usually have high trustworthiness, the latter are the group mainly have cooperative relations, based on the role cognition in daily life, the trust attitude level is between agree and neutral. According to
Urban | Rural | |||
---|---|---|---|---|
affective trust | cognitive trust | affective trust | cognitive trust | |
Model 3 | Model 4 | Model 5 | Model 6 | |
Individual annual income | −0.005 (−3.065)** | −0.003 (−1.994)** | 0.004 (0.503) | −0.005 (−0.483) |
Junior high school | 0.028 (0.663)* | −0.117 (−2.451)** | −0.071 (−1.569) | −0.137 (−2.361)** |
High school or Technical Secondary School | 0.013 (0.311) | −0.103 (−2.122)** | −0.194 (−2.614)** | −0.168 (−1.797)* |
College or University graduate | 0.167 (3.70)** | 0.111 (2.155)** | −0.039 (−0.257) | −0.004 (0.022) |
Gender | 0.061 (2.032)** | −0.035 (−1.020) | 0.059 (1.406) | 0.088 (1.644)* |
Political Affiliation | 0.099 (2.355)** | 0.160 (3.354)** | 0.194 (2.144)** | 0.313 (2.753)** |
Constant term | 8.079 (244.970)** | 5.402 (144.087)** | 8.302 (260.136)** | 5.862 (140.281)** |
Note: 1. the values in brackets are T test, **P < 0.01, *P < 0.1; 2. Reference group: variable of education is the group of primary school or less, variable of gender is woman, variable of political affiliation is the group of non-party relationship.
the personal income is higher, the level of particular trust attitude is lower, but the impact of income variable on rural model is not significant. The variable of education has statistical significance on cognitive trust in the model of urban, and the influence to trust level is U-shape, group of primary school or less as the benchmark, group of junior high school has the lowest trust level, when people receive education of high school degree or more, trust tend to increase. In the countryside, groups receive less education seem to have high cognitive trust. Variable of political affiliation has significant influence on affective trust and cognitive trust both in the urban and rural. Party members have higher particular trust level than non-party people.
In the study, education has more influence on the cognitive trust than on the affective trust, and the influence is more significantly in urban than in rural. People live in city usually have higher education degree, different from the kinship and geopolitical relationship, schoolmates become the important resource in social interaction, so the social network of city is more inclusive and open. But in rural geopolitical relationship is more preferred in the social intercourse, so social network of rural is relatively closed and dense. In addition, the residents’ trust attitude to religious people can also reflect the difference of social network. Lawrence Hrrison believes that every group which exists social capital has its own radius of trust, and cooperation norms are enforced in the circle (Harrison Laurence, 1985) [
3) The institutional environment and organization trust of urban and rural residents
and irresponsibility may lead to negative image of local officials and influence voters’ evaluation. It’s easy to cause the loss of political trust.
We study the various organizations and institutions with average rotation factor analysis, as
China has been at the same structure of clan and country for a long period. Government regulates and controls social resources configuration, deeply involves in citizens’ life and the development of social organizations, set up a strong authoritative trust. This is more obvious in the countryside, national-oriented and clan-oriented still dominate the rural residents’ trust model. However, with the enhancement of economic income and improvement of education level, people especially in the towns and cities are not easily satisfied with the governments’ public services. Authoritative trust has been questioned. In addition, both in rural and urban, the Chinese people’s trust of social autonomy organizations is low. People have low trust level to companies, it can also be proved from the perspective that economic income level is inversely proportional with the trust level and people’s confidence in the business is at the low degree. The main reason is that market trading rules, especially the supervision and sanctions regime are imperfect, market transactions make every participants face with a great deal of risk. At the other side, intellectual property protection mechanism is weak, citizens’ property can’t get lawful protection, so in China high-earning people have much more cautious and alert to the society. The development scale of non-governmental organizations is small and not enough mature, people don’t have much opportunities to participate in activities of such kind organizations, so they distrust autonomy organizations like non-governmental organizations and religious organizations. Thus non-governmental organization don’t play a key role in the management of social public affairs, the social resources have not been effectively utilize.
authoritative trust | autonomous trust | |
---|---|---|
Model 7 | Model 8 | |
Individual annual income | −0.011 (−5.822)** | −0.004 (−1.988)** |
Junior high school | −0.426 (−11.108)** | −0.192 (−4.391)** |
High school or Technical Secondary School | −0.661 (−14.456)** | −0.223 (−4.275)** |
College or University graduate | −0.997 (−18.971)** | 0.079 (1.311) |
Political Affiliation | 0.321 (0.062)** | 0.008 (0.144) |
Urban& rural | −0.412 (−0.117)** | 0.023 (0.569) |
Constant term | 8.246 (289.687)** | 4.965 (152.836)** |
Note: 1. the values in brackets are T test, **P < 0.01, *P < 0.1; 2. Reference group: variable of education is the group of primary school or less, variable of urban& rural areas is the group of rural areas, variable of political affiliation is the group of non-party relationship.
The trust social network in China is gradually becoming open and inclusive, people not only confined social interaction in the blood relationship circle, most people think others in society are deserved to believe. Cognitive trust has become an important part of social capital. However, at the background of increasingly diversified social environment and complicated interest structure, old trust system dominated by traditional culture is gradually weakening its influence of regulation, it’ s much apparently in the city, while the impact on rural is relatively weak, and still retained the most of the traditional trust model. The old trust system is gradually collapsed, but the new trust system has not yet been established. Legal system is incomplete, administrative rules and regulations are fragmented, and lack of binding norms and effective rules in the society easily causes social disorder. People feel confused and uncertainty, so they often tend to be more conservative on the selection strategy when choosing the cooperative partner, or through acquaintances preferences to select, resulting in a decline in social trust level. It also explains why in the rapid economic development of cities and towns, social networks are more open and inclusive, but residents’ expectations of social trust are lower than the countryside.
To reshape a new trust system to adapt to urbanization and development of market economy, firstly, government should perfect social norms to keep social order steady and certain, change the status quo of fragmented legal system, optional explanation as well as mutual conflict of rules, regulations, administrative regulations. At the same time, it should establish rewards and punishments mechanism, create a favorable environment for trading cooperation climate of trust, and make both parties acting in the form of trust. Secondly, promoting the popularization of higher education, it’s significant for improving the quality of the members of the organization to increase social trust, since the result shows that education has a U-shaped influence to the social trust, group of receiving higher education is more likely to trust others. And lastly, rebuilding trust needs to encourage citizens to actively participate in activities of voluntary associations, improve the social participation to promote the development of civil social organizations, making it a third mechanism outside of government and market to solve the social problems and deal with public affairs. It will expand the richness of social capital.
This work was supported in part by the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 13AZD093 and 15BGL154). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the National Social Science Foundation of China.
Guanqiong Yang,Shuxian Zeng, (2016) The Comparison of Trust Structure between Urban and Rural Residents in China. American Journal of Industrial and Business Management,06,665-673. doi: 10.4236/ajibm.2016.65062