Religion and Public Trust in Government in Contemporary China

This paper examines the impact of religious belief on the trust in central and local governments among Chinese people, based on micro-level data from a recent national representative survey. To mitigate problems of endogeneity, we use instrument variable (IV) regression with the number of religious sites in a given area as an instrument variable. Both OLS and IV regressions indicate that religious belief significantly reduces people’s trust in the Chinese central government. Furthermore, subsample analysis indicates that political trust of less educated people is more likely to be affected by religious belief. These results suggest that faith in the religious authority crowds out faith in the secular authority among Chinese people, which is because there is still a tension between the two powers in contemporary China.