Let’s switch gear and talk about trust in China.
Trust is the glue that holds society together. It binds communities, shapes institutions, and fuels economic activities.
The biggest collateral damage of the 10-year turmoil known as the Cultural Revolution has been the loss of trust for individuals and institutions alike.
People have bemoaned it and, having spent early childhood during those years, I thought trust might never come back again.
In the Three Body sci-fi novel by Liu Cixin, the main character, Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist, lost so much trust and faith in humanity that she voluntarily sent out earth’s coordinates to the “three-body civilization”, inviting an alien invasion to reform humanity.
She lost her father to the mindless struggles against intellectuals during Cultural Revolution. She herself was also repeatedly betrayed by the people around her from family to co-workers caught in the fever.
A worldly reader of my essays, who visited China in the past and is visiting again, wrote in the comment section of one of my recent essays, “what amazes me about China’s transformation is the high trust society it has developed and how genuinely helpful everyone is”.
This struck a chord as I recently read a survey, which put China among the world’s highest trust societies, along with the Nordic nations, long famous for their social cohesion.
In my view, this is a development that has far greater and long-lasting societal impact than short-term economic growth or technological progress.
After all, in a high trust society, people’s default assumption is that strangers, institutions, and even competitors will act honestly, competently and without malice.
This produces a cascade of economic, social and psychological pay-offs hard to replicate any other way – lower transactional costs, cheaper credit, higher innovation velocity, and healthier, happier life.
Put simply, high generalized trust is the only public good that simultaneously makes markets larger, governments cheaper, people healthier and life more pleasant.
Trust cannot be bought, only accumulated through consistent, observable reciprocity over time.....