Be Panic Or Not:an Analysis Of Chinese Trust From The Study Of The Public Food Safety Attitude

The exposure of food safety malignant events makes the food safety issues a public issue. Accordingly, some scholars put forward some concepts, such as "food safety scares" or "eating and producing dung", to express the negative emotions to the current food safety issues. But what is the real public attitude of food safety? Has the current society entered the era of "food safety scares"? Based on this, I try to analyze the public attitude to food safety.By analyzing the data-"the survey of household livelihood and social change of western China (WLTS)", we find that, at the macro level, the public hold a highly negative attitude to food safety, and to some extent, which shows the existence of "food safety scares", and the "food safety scares" existed in both people of female and male, rural and urban, young and old, high and low level of education, minority and Han people, people with or without belief. But with further analysis, we find that the public attitude of food safety is more complicated than we imagined, and we cannot simply use the word "food safety scares" to generalize it. So we use "panic and not", "trust and not", "panic but not fear" to generalize this social fsct. The public shows "panic" in the abstract level, but shows "not panic" in the daily life level; and they shows "panic" in the far distance level, but "not panic" in the close distance level; and they shows "panic" in the system level, but "not panic" in the interpersonal relationship level. This contradictory social phenomenon reflects the absent of social trust in China and the abnormal development of trust. We use "Chinese trusts" to generalize this phenomenon, and the preference of labeling and the fracture of social development are the main reasons of China’s "lemon trust".The "third way" and reflective modernity will be of great of significance to solve the potential food safety scares and social trust crisis. To improve social safety laws and strengthen supervision will be a valid path to reconstruct the influence of the social system to the trust.