How do natural disasters impact political trust in contemporary China and what is the causal mechanism? Existing literature indicates that the severity of disaster, government relief effort and information dissemination are three key factors influencing people’s political trust in the context of acute natural disasters. This study uses the Wenchuan earthquake as a natural experiment and focuses specifically on the survey data collected right before and after the earthquake. It finds that primarily due to the ‘rally round the flag’ effect and extensive media coverage, public trust in government officials at all levels rose significantly after the earthquake. During the crisis, state-run media played a vital intermediate role. The more a citizen was exposed to the official media coverage, the more likely his/her political trust was to increase. However, the division of work in disaster relief among different levels of government resulted in differences in the level of increase in trust. As local-level governments are often directly responsible for the rescue and post-earthquake relief, they gained the highest increase in political trust, while state-level officials gained the least. The short-run upsurge in political trust receded as time went by. Government mobilization and media coverage are core contributing factors to the increase in political trust during the post-disaster period. Nevertheless, the key to consolidating political legitimacy lies in long-term efforts to build good and effective governance.

This paper investigates how natural-resource endowments affect the provision of local public goods in China. According to fiscal sociology, due to the rentier effect, resource-rich local governments tend to have more state autonomy and are less responsive to society, resulting in poor governance. Moreover, due to political myopia, resource-abundant local governments tend to neglect the accumulation of human capital. Shanxi's county-level governments are excellent samples to test these hypotheses. Statistical results show that resource-abundant local governments tend to spend less on social expenditures as well as specific education, social security and healthcare, and environmental protection expenditures. Meanwhile, coal-rich governments spend significantly more on self-serving administrative expenditures. The results suggest that negative impacts of natural resources on governmental fiscal extraction and expenditure behaviors are an important causal mechanism of the resource-curse hypothesis. To curb this problem, the current fiscal system needs to be reformed accordingly.

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