Affiliation with different religions can have different effects on practitioners’ trust in state institutions and in social actors. Based on a survey of 3,740 residents in Hong Kong in 2021, we examine the relationship between religious affiliation and believers’ trust in the political authorities in Beijing and Hong Kong and in civil actors in the city. We find that affiliation with traditional Chinese religions and Eastern religions has a positive and significant effect on believers’ trust in the political authorities, whereas belief in Western religions does not have such an effect. Affiliation with Western religions, however, has a stronger positive and significant effect on interpersonal trust and on tolerance for unconventional behaviour. These findings shed light on the interaction between the government and religious groups in Hong Kong after 1997.

Much research on contentious politics focuses on the origins and dynamics of contention or the impact of contention on policy change. Although some studies have delved into the state reactions to contention, relatively little is known about the outcome or effectiveness of state responses, especially in non-democratic settings. This paper attempts to fill this gap and to uncover the policy feedback effect in non-democratic settings by studying the Chinese state's repression of violent incidents targeted at healthcare personnel and facilities (yinao). I argue that without comprehensive healthcare reforms to tackle the root causes of yinao, state repression of yinao generates unintended adverse outcomes, causing the doctor–patient relationship to deteriorate. Using the difference-in-differences method with China Family Panel Studies data for 2014 and 2016, I find that the criminalization of yinao diminishes public trust in doctors and confidence in hospitals’ competence and instead increases public concerns about the healthcare system.

We hypothesize that informal bank networks influence corporate credit access in China. Our sample comprises a panel of 515 corporations listed on China's stock exchanges with a total of 1,052 firm-year observations, holding a total of 7,009 major bank loans from 183 distinct banks between 2007 and 2012. Results support the hypothesis that closure in bank networks facilitates credit access. We further show that the positive closure-performance association offers fewer advantages if financial markets and the legal infrastructure are relatively well developed. Our findings contribute to an emergent literature examining how informal networks can productively substitute weak formal institutions, and how the interplay between informal networks and network embeddedness shapes individual and corporate strategies.

This article addresses corruption as a negative practice displaying the ‘darker side’ of social capital in Chinese guanxi and Russian blat/svyazi networks. It presents a conceptual framework integrating several research streams to establish a conceptual linkage between social network characteristics and three forms of corruption between business persons and public officials: cronyism, bribery, and extortion. We argue that the forms of corruption in a society are determined by the nature of social network ties and their underlying morality, with particularistic and general trust being key factors. Our framework depicts networks as three concentric circles representing three types of corruption resulting from their corresponding types of reciprocity: open, closed, and negative. We then apply the framework to the practice of guanxi in China and blat/svyazi in Russia. We propose that different network characteristics and different forms of corruption may help explain what we label the ‘China-Russia paradox’ of why corruption and high economic growth have co-existed in China, at least in the short term, but less so in Russia. We conclude with ethical and legal implications for doing business in those two transforming economies and offer suggestions for future research.

Moral obligation, reciprocity, and affection contribute to the development of strong interpersonal relationships. An indigenous notion in Chinese culture, jiangyiqi, captures these three component principles of strong relationship development in one concept. Jiangyiqi has been held anecdotally as a common code of conduct for building strong, trustworthy relationships in China. We explore the possible integration of these three components of interpersonal relationships in Chinese society in our introduction of the construct of jiangyiqi, based upon Confucian ethics and the circles of relationships delineated in past literature on Chinese societies. Drawing from social exchange theory as well as the perspective of reciprocal altruism in evolutionary biology, we propose that jiangyiqi makes an individual a good candidate for developing strong non-kin relationships. We discuss the managerial implications of jiangyiqi for relationship building in a Chinese cultural context.

Instead of importing Western models of intelpersonal trust, we adopted a qualitative approach to understand trust relationships from indigenous cultures' perspectives. We examined trust relationships directed at diilerent foci in the organization (supervisor, peer, and subordinate) in two different countries, Turkey and China. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 Turkish and 30 Chinese employees working for a variety of large-scale organizations located in Istanbul, Turkey and Shenzhen, China. We report the content analysis of trust-building critical incidents narrated by the respondents. While the general antecedents of Ability, Benevolence, and Integrity were found to exist in both countries. Benevolence, with its culture-specific manifestations, played a very important role in trust-building across multiple foci in both countries. We also found that trust relationships in these two contexts tended to go beyond the professional domain, and to involve sharing of personal time, information, and space. Drawing on this evidence, we propose a trust-building process that is more affective in nature and which straddles both work and non-work domains.

This study investigates the relationship between level of trust and cooperative behaviours in a social dilemma. We argue that this relationship should depend on the basis of trust (cognition- versus affect-based) and on beliefs about the equality of resource endowments. Results supported our prediction that increasing affect-based trust increases cooperation, but increasing cognition-based trust to a certain level can reduce cooperation because of free-riding tendency. Moreover, these effects of trust are stronger for individuals who believed that other group members had more resources than they did. Thus, our study demonstrates that higher levels of trust do not necessarily encourage cooperation. Implications of these findings are discussed.

We examine the influence of social distance on levels of trust and reciprocity in China. Social distance, reflected in the indigenous concept of guanxi, is of central importance to Chinese culture. In Study 1, some participants participated in two financially salient trust games to measure behaviour, one with an anonymous classmate and the other with an anonymous, demographically identical non-classmate. Other participants, drawn from the same population, completed hypothetical surveys to gauge both hypothetical behaviour and expectations of others. Social distance effects on actual and hypothetical behaviour were statistically consistent. The results together corroborated the hypothesized negative relationship between trust and social distance. However, reciprocity was not responsive to social distance. Study 2 found that affect-based trust, but not cognition-based trust, played a mediating role in the relationship between social distance and interpersonal trust in a hypothetical scenario. We conclude that close guanxi ties in China engender affect-based trust, which is extended to shouren classmates. This is true despite the fact that no more cognition-based trust is placed nor reciprocity received or expected from classmates compared to demographically identical shengren non-classmates.

This study contributes to strategic human resource management (HRM) research by offering a contextualized model of HRM effectiveness. Building on HR attribution theory, we propose that the high commitment work system will be more effective in a context when: (i) employees are conditioned to trust employers and (ii) regulatory institutions are less restrictive, giving management more autonomy in human resource decisions. In such contexts, we argue that employees are more inclined to view the high commitment work system as an expression of the employer's genuine concern for employees. Hence, employees are more likely to reciprocate with high commitment. We find our contextualized HRM effectiveness model particularly useful in understanding HRM – firm performance relations in China where business environments are currently under transformation on both trust and regulations.