This carries over to professionals. If my landlord hires a dude to come in and fix my water heater, I need to just assume that both the landlord, the repair company and the repairman are all suitably qualified, and that the repairman isn’t just some dude with a toolbelt that didn’t have an oven fan to clean that day. But how do I do that? Check his credentials? Call the company? Trust that the credentials are real? And expand that to virtually any situation (e.g. the vet I mentioned in the OP) and we would literally not be able to move due to the weight of just checking up on things we can’t trust.

Obviously we can’t do that, and so we leap. We just hope that whatever the next big problem is, we’ll not be affected by it. And maybe it’s because I was affected, as my dog died terribly due to a failure in trust, that the illusion of it all is harder to maintain now.

Friends though, should be as you say — why would we have friends that aren’t trustworthy? That’s a personal decision that we’re able to filter relatively easily. Products, services, environment and culture aren’t really things we can choose with much variance here. (If you don’t like it, leave!)

I think the longer you stay in China, the more this becomes an issue, as the exponentially higher your odds get of having something bad happen. While many foreigners have been here much much longer than me, most get out early and so never really have to deal with this issue.

In China, because there is no ever present god, people rely on society to keep everyone in check. This means it is very important to make connections and use them. If there is anything important that needs to be done you should never rely on anyone found through the buzz, as these people will not feel obliged to help you. Finding someone through your net of friends is the surest bet because not only does the the person helping you feel pressure from your mutual connection to do the job right, but your mutual friend also feels the pressure to make sure his connection does the job right.

In china they call it face, and using a connection to get a job done is a practice in raising face, your connection gets face by supplying you with a person to accomplish the task you need, and also gets face by supplying a friend with business so he/she will work hard to ensure that the job is done.

The biggest problem I have had to deal with in China, and perhaps the root of many people’s trust issue, is the fact that Chinese people do not always say what they think. In the west, saying what you think is considered a positive trait, while in China it is somewhat looked down upon and often thought of as too direct. Most of what Chinese people say has a motive and much of it is untrue and simply there to serve a purpose. The trouble comes in deciphering this talk since it is much more subtle than anything we do in the west. This is an art that must be mastered before you can begin to trust people in China.

I would also like to point out that while in china it is difficult to trust anyone outside your guanxi circle, in the west people often complain of being unable to trust the people inside their guanxi circle, and personally I think that is much worse.

By the way, if you think being raised in an atheist household has protected you from the Christian morals that plague western society you are dead wrong. Our taboo system, law system, and system of acceptance are all based in Christian thought system. The Chinese code of morals are different, not based on the idea of an ever present authority figure, this is why Confucianism relies on guanxi to keep people in check.

I’ve also never met a mean ex-patriot from China. (this doesn’t mean much either)

But I must say that having studied Chinese religion and history in college for 2+ years, I must disagree about the statements that China has no morality because it has no Christianity.

Confucius (Kungfutzu) was incredibly big on helping those outside of your family. Look him up if you think Chinese people have always been greedy selfish bastards.

Besides that, however, I think everyone should consider the fact that desperate people do desperate things when they feel they have no choice.

Living in a China where you can’t trust anyone has got to create the worst case of paranoia and depression. The feelings that these people who have lived in China are expressing . . . guess what? They are human beings living in a certain country called China, and that means other human beings living in China probably also have these same feelings every day – and they are probably Chinese.

There are probably also many Chinese people who have not experienced this (probably in the countryside) The fact is, sometimes we get screwed over. Sometimes we are lucky and don’t. Sometimes we seem blessed then have a horrible tragedy and we learn late in life that it’s not all roses. (Read “The Talented Women of the Jong Family” to read about some real-life Chinese women who had this happen to them.)

Let’s just put things this way. I have a professor who is funny and smart and yet is the most jaded man I’ve ever known. You can read his weariness with the world on his face and in the fact that he often takes off his wedding ring or doesn’t come to class with it at all.

Yet this man loves the Chinese people, and the Chinese language, and when I read these posts about how hard it is to trust the government when living there, I said to myself “man. That’s why he loves them so much. He can commiserate. He knows what it feels like to be kicked when he’s down and given a raw deal. He knows how the everyday Chinese person feels.”

We should feel compassion for people pushed to the edge, people forced by circumstance and bad luck to betray their own morals (and they DO have them!), people forced to live remembering the things they had to do. And we should try to remember that actions taken by nations (wars, deregulations, what-have you) are NOT chosen by individual citizens. Don’t blame the people for the government. Do you think the citizens under Mao were happy at the end, when it had all fallen apart? Read “Son of the Revolution” to get a true picture of how it felt. Children were forced to turn on their parents, friends forced to turn on friends, and the very small number of truly evil people managed to get away with worse than murder. (And such things have happened in every part of the world at some point since the beginning of time.)

Keep in mind that we can’t tell who is truly evil or who is truly desperate. All I know is, out of all of the people I have met in my life, very few have been evil, but a great deal have felt like they didn’t know who to trust, and act badly because they have no more faith in humanity.

And if you really believe people are inherently selfish and evil, then I pity you most of all.