China's Grass-roots Political Trust: A Comprehensive Interpretative Framework

Under the grand background of modernization, globalization and diversification, as well as the increasing occurrence of mass emergencies and more importance attached to issues like political legitimacy and political stability, the word "political trust" has aroused considerable controversy. As a result, the political trust in China, which is the research object of this thesis, has attracted more attention.There has not yet formed a complete theoretical system in terms of the topic of Political Trust itself. Likewise, the study on the political problems in China has a late start and few related findings which mainly concentrate on empirical research. According to the existing results of empirical research and quantitative analysis, the distribution of political trust in China is also hierarchical. However, such hierarchy is distinctly opposite to the situation, in the shape of a regular triangle, in most Western countries:The distribution of China's political trust is in the shape of an upside-down triangle. In China, the distribution of political trust is in descent by levels from the central government to the grass-root government within the political system. The central government possesses a high degree of political trust while the grass-root government as the basic political unit struggles to maintain the low one. Such imbalanced distribution has created notable differences between the central government and the grass-root government concerning the issue of political trust.Based on the clarification of concept and the collation of previous theoretical results, this thesis firstly conducts historical review and comparisons on the current status of China's political trust, then analyzes the hierarchical distribution system of political trust, and further compares the remote political trust and grass-root political trust, from the Quartet dimensions of economic growth mechanism, motivation of pursuing political trust, measure for such pursuit and degree and scope of the pursuit. The thesis attempts to construct synthesized theoretical analyses and explanations framework from multiply dimensions toward the source of that the grass-root government maintains a low degree from comparison view. This framework includes the cultural dimension, the historical dimension, the institutional dimension and the interaction process dimension. And the cultural dimension and the institutional dimension are included for the macro and micro dimensions of the two side dimensionsThe conclusion of the thesis emphasizes the adverse influence of low political trust of the grass-root government in China, and hopes to propose theoretical reference for enhancing political trust of grass-root government's.