From Low Trust To High In China

According to Fukuyama, impersonalistic Germans, Japanese and Americans could operate at ultra-high levels of social trust, allowing large corporations to form organically, while familistic peoples like Chinese and Italians need state intervention to form meaningfully large enterprises. Russians, with neither deep familial bonds nor liberal values, degenerate into mafia mayhem in the absence of a strong state.

If readers think this piece will now devolve into another Francis Fukuyama bashing exercise, they are absolute correct. We cannot let“The End of History” steal all the limelight. Francis Fukuyama has produced other stinkers as well and the long-forgotten“Trust” has aged just as poorly.

Since reform and opening up, the Chinese have said that a generation gap forms every three years. China is changing so rapidly that social habits, mores and expectations turn over every 36 months. It is much more than a commentary on unbridled economic growth.

It marked a society in tumult. In this heady mix, Hang Feizi pushed, hustled, bickered, got hustled, fought, howled and didn't trust anyone as far as he could throw them.

And then it all changed. It's hard to date the change. Covid delayed Hang Feizi's return to Beijing by two years. But things have definitely changed. China's intermittent Covid lockdowns lasted three years – the standard length of a generation gap in China. Of course it had to change. The go-go days were spinning of control. A new generation was long overdue.

Hang Feizi is finding this new Beijing disconcerting. What happened to all the smokers? And all the loogie hockers? Everybody automatically queues up in the subway, faces buried in their phones. Three young folks have offered Hang Feizi their subway seats. That was Hang Feizi's first time getting the senior treatment and it was as humiliating as he had imagined.

Hang Feizi steeled himself for the bureaucratic nightmare of opening bank accounts, getting a local phone number and registering with the public security office, not looking forward to stone-faced functionaries and their dismissive attitudes.

The reality was shocking, as if Han Feizi had entered the Twilight Zone. Bank employees bent over backward to accommodate Han Feizi's various special circumstances and requests. The public security office was similarly helpful. Han Feizi was on edge for months wondering whether body snatchers had invaded Beijing and turned the population into service-obsessed imposters. He had to test it.

Han Feizi picked an unnecessary quarrel with a DiDi driver expecting the old Beijing blowback. And nothing. Just polite nodding and de-escalation. Han Feizi's better half chewed out subway security for confiscating an aerosol can.

While still steaming on the train platform, a security manager chased her down and offered to keep the offending item in her office for later collection. Yes, Beijing has been invaded by body snatchers and Han Feizi does not like it one bit. This is Beijing for chrissake, not Tokyo!

Perhaps Brooks and Ipsos know something Han Feizi does not. Street crime has all but disappeared. University students leave their laptops and belongings unguarded in the library. The hairdresser will give you a fruit plate just because. The bristly facade Beijingers previously fortified themselves with to face a treacherous public has melted away into a subdued politeness.

The obsessive attention to service can partially be attributed to 内卷or“involution”, a term used in China to describe diminishing returns for additional effort. As growth slows, competition becomes more intense resulting in over-the-top efforts by businesses to satisfy customers. Retail businesses in China are slaves to reviews on e-commerce apps.

If a bad review has merit, nine times out of ten, the merchant will reach out and offer to make amends. While this certainly has consumer benefits, the flip side is the exhaustive workload service workers are expected to bear. Han Feizi notes the improved service but wonders if it is merely an expression of deflation, reserving judgment until the economy rebounds.

Technological tools like ubiquitous CCTV cameras, facial recognition and real-name phone registration has contributed to both the reality and, just as importantly, the perception of public safety. Everyone knows that everyone knows that they are being watched by CCTV. This has lowered the blood pressure of a once high-strung public.

In the absence of property crime, people are less on guard, less ready to get their backs up and less inclined to bare their fangs. Public shouting matches, a once favorite pastime of Beijingers has sadly disappeared. We note that none of this is a result of a“social credit score” which, so far, exists as small pilot programs and in the fevered imagination of Western media.

After the media publicized instances of citizens' Kafkaesque experiences navigating bureaucracies for routine services, a campaign was launched to overhaul public-facing government offices. This was a natural extension of the decade-long anti-corruption campaign which eliminated low-level bureaucratic misbehavior.

The 12345 public hotline was expanded and empowered to register complaints, the minimization of which has become a significant KPI for public-facing government agencies.

As Brooks documents the demise of social trust in America, Han Feizi is left scratching his head in China. This new Beijing is freaking him out. It was not supposed to be possible. According to Fukuyama, social trust cannot be engineered:

Civil society, as we all know, are voluntary association such as churches, charities, unions and businesses which are the instruments by which people are socialized into high-trust citizens. These institutions are products of liberal societies and enlightenment values which, according to Fukuyama, have no government substitutes:

The social capital needed to create this kind of moral community cannot be acquired, as in the case of other forms of human capital, through a rational investment decision.

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Of course, the past three decades have not been kind to Francis Fukuyama's historical takes. Even before China's recent climb up the social trust league tables, it had already created behemoth private companies like Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei and BYD, which Fukuyama had deemed impossible:

In his 2014 tome,“Political Order and Political Decay”, Fukuyama offered up a mea culpa of sorts. As it turns out, civil society is not necessarily the secret sauce without which high trust societies would wither. In fact, Fukuyama has belatedly discovered, civil society can form interest groups, which can ossify the political system, turning America into a vetocracy:

How indeed. Han Feizi will leave that question up to Brooks, Fukuyama and their ilk. What Han Feizi is more interested in is this nascent high trust society that Beijing appears to have achieved.

On a recent trip to Hong Kong, Han Feizi had a discombobulating feeling that Hong Kong citizens were rude, dismissive and uncouth. To be sure, in his head, Han Feizi has heavily caveated his observations by the obvious fact that Beijing may not be representative of all of China, that surface niceties disguise deeper pathologies and that some ineffable vitality may have been sacrificed.

This alien high-trust Beijing has also thrown a wrench into Han Feizi's personal plans. One major reason Han Feizi returned to Beijing is for the next generation. Besides providing a better foundation of China knowledge, Han Feizi believes, with his masochistic parenting philosophy, that young people who have never experienced a developing economy and all its maladies will be too soft for the coming decades.

This is turning out to be a massive fail. Ah well, there are a lot of universities in America.

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