DOI: 10.36347/sjebm.2017.v04i02.008

Pages: 105-122

Political trust, as a key element of political capital, has an important influence on the survival and development of the country. In recent years, China‟s political trust has been declining. In a variety of factors influencing political trust, corruption is considered to be the most important factor. Since the implementation of the reform and opening up policy, China has investigated and dealt with all kinds of economic cases and corruption cases have been more than 1 million, an average of more than 30,000 per year, while the corruption has been disclosed is only part of the actual corruption activities. The frequent corruption cases have a serious impact on political trust (Ma,2007), the occurrence of corruption reduced the public‟s political trust on government. In the whole field of corruption research, the subjective corruption has not been paid enough attention by the scholars. In addition, compared to subjective corruption, the "objective corruption" as an objective indicator of the public's actual understanding of the corrupt behavior of government agencies or officials, also has a significant impact on the public's political trust in the government agencies. According to analysis the data of Asian Barometer Survey data of 2008 in main land China, the “objective corruption” has more serious negative impact on political trust than “subjective corruption”. Moreover, political trust also has impacts on corruption, which means that if the public doesn‟t believe in government agencies, they may regard government actions as corrupt. Hence, the relationship between them is endogenous.