Social Trust and Political Movement: Evidence from the Mandatory Rustication Program in China

The rustication program, implemented between 1953 and 1978, involved the forced relocation of urban youths (zhiqing) to rural areas to engage in manual labor as part of a campaign designed to reshape their political ideologies. This mixed-method project draws upon data from the China Family Panel Studies waves of 2010 and 2014, alongside 15 semi-structured interviews, to assess the effects of this program on the social trust levels of both sent-down youths and their children, while also exploring the mechanisms driving these causal relationships.

Exploiting the national-scale political movement as a quasi-experimental design, this paper quantitatively evaluates its long-term and intergenerational effect on social trust level using regression discontinuity design. The findings indicate that the rustication experience significantly eroded the social trust of both the affected youths and their descendants, which are robust across multiple statistical tests and specifications. Several mechanisms underpinning this causal relationship are tested statistically significant, including reduced annual income, diminished political trust, and an increased focus on self-reliance over social networks.

To further explore the mechanisms, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 8 sent-down youths and 7 zhiqing’s children. Thematic analysis was utilized to probe into the vicissitudes of trust and distrust in the context and aftermath of the rustication program. The findings reveal that six mechanisms—social-psychology, social success, community, voluntary association, social networks, and societal theories—contribute to explaining the program's effect on social trust.

This paper makes significant contributions to the field by complementing two strands of cumulative, ongoing scholarship on trust formation and the enduring legacies of the rustication program. Empirically, it evaluates the rustication program by investigating its previously-overlooked social capital costs. Theoretically, this paper uses rustication as a prominent case to synthesizing competing theories regarding the origins of social trust, advancing our understanding of social trust formation.