China’s pervasive social distrust stems from totalitarian destruction of traditional affiliations

Evidence

Writing in Foreign Policy, journalist Amy Hawkins explains that China’s pandemic of social distrust is the problem to which the social credit system is addressed as the cure: “To be Chinese today is to live in a society of distrust, where every opportunity is a potential con and every act of generosity a risk of exploitation.” A fascinating empirical study of social trust in contemporary China actually finds high levels of “in-group” trust but discovers that these are correlated with negative health outcomes. The conclusion is that many Chinese trust only the people who are well-known to them. All other relationships are regarded with suspicion and anxiety, with obvious consequences for social trust as well as well-being. This rampant distrust, typically assigned to the traumas of rapid modernization and the shift to a quasi-capitalist economy, is also the legacy of Chinese totalitarianism. The Chinese Communist Party dismantled traditional domains of affiliation, identity, and social meaning—family, religion, civil society, intellectual discourse, political freedom—recalling Arendt’s description of the “atomization” that destroys bonds of trust. As Hawkins writes, “But rather than promoting the organic return of traditional morality to reduce the gulf of distrust, the Chinese government has preferred to invest its energy in technological fixes… and it’s being welcomed by a public fed up of not knowing who to trust… in part because there’s no alternative.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1240

Categorization

• QUESTION: The in-group trust correlating with negative health outcomes is a genuinely puzzling empirical finding worth chasing.
• XREF: Arendt’s atomization thesis connects to the reader’s familiarity with totalitarianism scholarship and to moral-panic social theory. — connects to: Totalitarian regimes can sustain themselves by deliberately cultivating pervasive distrust. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 467; Social order can emerge from distrust rather than trust. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 784; Soviet centralization produced distrust by replacing market signals with personal blame — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 842 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Totalitarian regimes can sustain themselves by deliberately cultivating pervasive distrust. #corroborates (0.90) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 467
• Institutions deliberately engineer distrust to block group mobilization against them #corroborates (0.88) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 487
• Soviet centralization produced distrust by replacing market signals with personal blame #expands (0.85) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 842
• Social order can emerge from distrust rather than trust. #qualifies (0.80) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 784
• Post-Mao China replaced Marxist legitimacy with performance and nationalist legitimacy #qualifies (0.75)
• Imperial racism and bureaucracy supply the elements of totalitarian rule #expands (0.72) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 567