Shrinking Trust in Growing China: A Trade-Off Between Fast Growth, Change and Institutionalized Cooperation?

Shuanping Dai and Wolfram Elsner

Forum for Social Economics, 2021, vol. 50, issue 3, 297-315

Abstract: Emergence and growth, or deterioration, of general trust, endogenously depend on socio-economic transformations. This paper attempts to explain a shrinking general trust in China, against the background of its ‘reform-opening up’ phase, by means of repeated prisoners’ dilemma games on networks. We find that the more anonymous large-scale interaction arenas for immigrants in the boom regions, where lack of new, more appropriate network structures for them to substitute their lost rural home networks, resulted in higher uncertainty, integration failure, and less trust and cooperation. The general increase of social and geographical distance may have driven China from an ‘acquaintance society’ to a ‘stranger society’ with a lower general trust and institutionalized cooperation. A network model that addresses the interaction ‘deep structure’ of the socio-economy then may provide a potential strategic option for China to recover earlier high general trust.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/07360932.2020.1747516 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:fosoec:v:50:y:2021:i:3:p:297-315

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFSE20

DOI: 10.1080/07360932.2020.1747516

Access Statistics for this article

Forum for Social Economics is currently edited by William Milberg, Dr Wolfram Elsner, Philip O'Hara, Cecilia Winters and Paolo Ramazzotti

More articles in Forum for Social Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().