The Analyzation Of Mutual Trust Relation Between Governments And Citizens From The Perspective Of Contentious Politics

With China’s sustained and rapid economic development, the contradictions and conflictsof the society caused by social transformation show fast increasing tendency and one of itscharacteristic is the frequent social protests in politics. It is generally believed that deterioratingrelations between government and citizens is an important psychological motivation causingsocial protests. Overall, domestic literatures of the research have progressed significantly indescribing the crisis of government trust, leaving administrators’ trust in citizens nearlyunexplored. This study attempts to reveal the essential features of the development of mutualtrust between Chinese government and the public since its creation in1949by using threemethods—historical research, data analysis, case analysis.History study reveals that mutual trust development between governments and citizens isclosely related to China’s political system, especially political information transmissionmechanism and official and civil interactive mechanism. With the development of marketeconomy, the mutual trust relationship has appeared some new features in the21th century. Onthe one hand, the mutual trust relation gradually divides into two levels-high trust to centralgovernment and low trust or mistrust to local ones. On the other hand, the mutual trustrelationship shows two forms: Explicit mutual trust which people’s subjective awareness isconsistent with behavior and Tacit mutual trust which people’s subjective awareness is notconsistent with behavior. This result can be explained by the transform of political resourcewhich people put their trust in. In order to further investigate mutual trust’s affecting factors and the linkage betweenmutual trust and contentious politics, attribution analysis and quantum array are made based ontwo surveys. Considering the good validity and reliability of two surveys, the studies offervaluable conclusions:(1) Citizens’ trust in government is heavily affected by political efficacyof citizens and government work satisfaction.(2) The trust in government-protest orientationcorrelation is statistically significant.(3) The basic government administrators arecomparatively neutral but a little distrustful of citizens.(4) Administrators’ trust in citizens isheavily affected by self-efficacy, interactive experience perception.(5) The moreadministrators trust citizens, the more they are willing to take the initiative to pursue mutualbenefits, such as enhance communications and political participation. When administrators arestrongly willing to communicate with citizens and citizens have secure dialogue channels, it islikely to resolve conflicts and avoid escalating conflicts to contentious politics.At present, China is undergoing in the in-depth reform period. The latest case studyindicates that it is likely to lead to social protest just because of the mistrust betweengovernments and citizens. Therefore, under the new situation, working out effective ways tosolve social protests should start with fostering mutual trust. To rebuild mutual trust,government needs to stress affecting factors as above in strategy design and grasp two keypoints:(1) optimizing political information transmission mechanism and official and civilinteractive mechanism and (2) changing administrators’ pre-determined negative attitude tocitizens, so as to remove barriers from institutions and concepts to rebuild mutual trustrelationship.