Abstract
We use the China General Social Survey (2005) and the Home Office Citizenship Survey (2005) to study civic engagement and neighbourhood trust in China and Britain in this paper. We focus on class differences in participation in sports/recreation, religion, children's/adult education and public-welfare activities, and trust in the neighbours. We find higher levels of civic involvement in Britain but greater neighbourhood trust in China. This is mainly due to structural differences. China has a large proportion of peasants who have very low levels of civic involvement but very high levels of neighbourhood trust. Among the non-peasant population, the two countries have similar levels of class differences in civic (except religious) involvement. There are small class differences in China on neighbourhood trust, but marked effects in Britain. Overall, there is a greater similarity than difference in class effects in both civic engagement and social trust in the two countries. While differences in demographic attributes (and China's specific institutional arrangement, the household registration system, or hukou) account for some of the observed patterns, we also find more pronounced class than demographic effects in the two countries. Class plays a major role in the development of social capital.
Highlights
Much research has been conducted on civic engagement and social trust, in Britain and the USA
As civic engagement cannot be separated from the socio-political life in a country like China, any study of social capital would be incomplete without taking into account the role played by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) membership, just as with hukou
The peasant class have a very low level of involvement in formal recreational, educational and public/welfare activities, much below any other group. Apart from this exceedingly low involvement as induced by the institutionally-enforced barrier, we find marked class differences among the non-peasant sections in China, which amount to a similar extent to that found in Britain
Summary
Much research has been conducted on civic engagement and social trust, in Britain and the USA. As civic engagement cannot be separated from the socio-political life in a country like China, any study of social capital would be incomplete without taking into account the role played by the CCP membership, just as with hukou. Even the factors outlined above—differences in civic tradition, socio-economic development and the unique combination of the CCP rule and the household registration (hukou) system in China, which is absent in Britain and other developed countries, and in other countries of the developing world—would make the comparative study being undertaken here approximate to a 'most different systems' analysis which would lead us to expect pronounced differences in social capital in the two countries.
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