BEIJING: Sex workers are more trustworthy than government officials. And state-published data is 'largely falsified'. These views from a just-published survey confirm the trend of declining public trust in China in recent years, observers said.
The poll of 3,376 people showed that trust in Chinese society had sunk to a new low in the past decade compared to years past, said the state-run Xiaokang magazine which conducted the online survey in June and July this year.
Nine in 10 attributed this to the ultra-competitive - 'quick success and instant benefits' - society that China has become.
The state of public trust in China is so deplorable that, as one netizen on the magazine's online forum quipped, 'when Chinese people talk about integrity, God laughs'.
While China's economy has grown phenomenally in the 30 years since it unshackled itself from a command system, social inequalities have mounted - and the country's legal system and governance have not kept pace.
A sign of bubbling discontent: a rising tide of mass protests in recent years.
Last year, the government dealt with more than 100,000 mass incidents of civil unrest. Data for this year has not been released, but news reports on clashes between people and local government officials abound.
In the survey in the latest issue of the monthly magazine published by the Chinese Communist Party, participants were asked to rank 49 occupations in terms of trustworthiness.
Their top five picks: farmers, religious workers, sex workers, soldiers and students.
Scientists, teachers and government officials ranked far lower.
At the bottom of the list: real estate bosses, secretaries, brokers, show business celebrities and movie directors.
In a separate poll, some 40 per cent of urban Chinese said they feared that an apartment building in their cities might collapse, after a 13-storey block fell over in Shanghai in June.
At one level, the Xiaokang survey reflects 'public sympathy for the underdog in an unjust society', said Mr Li Fan, a
Beijing-based expert on grassroots democracy, in a phone interview.
In a sign that society has lost its moral compass, teachers and officials who were once figures of justice and authority now have little credibility, noted Dr Zhao Litao, a sociologist at the National University of Singapore's East Asian Institute.
The crux of the problem, said scholars, was the erosion of the government's own cachet.
Of those polled, 49 per cent said they were 'extremely worried' about the credibility of the government and of the corporate world.
More than 90 per cent said they believed that data published by the state was 'largely falsified' or 'definitely falsified and cannot be trusted'. In a similar survey in 2007, less than 80 per cent of those polled were as cynical.
Dr Zhao said: 'Trust in the government underpins all trust in any society. In China, people often find they cannot get justice from officials or the courts.'
The blame lies primarily with local officials, said Mr Li, who heads a non-governmental research institute dedicated to mutual understanding between China and the world.
While ordinary Chinese usually hold the central authorities in high regard, local officials' repeated bungling has sparked social unrest and eroded trust at the grassroots, he said.
'Local officials should act as a neutral party working for the benefit of ordinary people, but they are instead often fighting with regular folk for land, fees or other sorts of interest,' he said.
If Beijing's aura of credibility is worn down as well, said Mr Li, 'there will be even more social unrest because the Chinese don't have a tradition of sitting down to solve problems'.
The slide in public trust needs to be arrested, argued an editorial in the state-owned China Daily yesterday.
It said: ' The first step...is to put an end to public servants being alienated from public interest.'
simcy@sph.com.sg
