There can be no more damning verdict on the mainland's officials than the fact that they are regarded by the public as less trustworthy than sex workers. But that was the conclusion of a new survey conducted by the magazine Xiaokang.
Respondents to the poll placed prostitutes third on the list of the five most trusted groups of people on the mainland, with farmers and religious workers above them, and soldiers and students in the fourth and fifth.
Anyone who has been tracking the way the public has lost faith in those who rule, thanks to a succession of well-publicised scandals across the country, will not be surprised that officials are considered untrustworthy. But they might well be shocked that hookers, who don't exist officially on the mainland, have risen to such an exalted position. Nor are religious figures exactly prominent in the public eye, given the authorities' continued monitoring of all spiritual groups.
Siding with the underdog, though, has been one of the trends of 2009, whether it's a waitress who stabs an official trying to rape her, or the victims of companies who pump deadly chemicals into the environment in pursuance of profit. So, given the rapacious reputation of property developers, it was entirely predictable that the Xiaokang survey ranked real estate entrepreneurs as the least trustworthy group.
But it isn't just those involved in the business of government - and it is, more than ever, an industry - who ranked low in the survey. Also under attack were Beijing's statistics, with more than 90 per cent of the respondents saying they no longer believed the government's official figures. That's a jump of more than 10 per cent from 2007, when the survey was last conducted.
If the data put out by Beijing is now considered to be false, then the government's credibility is truly on the line. Again, though, it is hard to fault the public's sense that something is not right. After all, many international banks and institutions treat Beijing's figures with the utmost suspicion, because they can be challenged so easily, or are rigged so that they appear more palatable.
