Abstract

A major goal of ideological education in China is to promote loyalty to the party-state and to instill atheism among the people. How effective is this ideological education? This article examines the relationship between education and trust in government and trust in religion using data from the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey. We find that education is negatively associated with trust in government, while positively related to trust in religion. Our findings suggest that policies aimed at displacing religion in favor of the Communist ideology have largely failed to shape the public mindset; rather, the more educated, the more people tend to trust religion instead of the government.

Comments

This is a PDF of Xie, Y.; Tong, Y.; Yang, F. Does Ideological Education in China Suppress Trust in Religion and Foster Trust in Government? Religions 2017, 8, 94. DOI: 10.3390/rel8050094, published by MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).

Keywords

trust; religion; Chinese society; education

Date of this Version

5-15-2017

DOI

10.3390/rel8050094

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