Trust levels are plummeting across the pandemic-ravaged world. But what about in Hong Kong?

Name: As Biden enters White House, world leaders express ‘relief’ and welcome ‘friend’ and ‘mate’ back
Uploaded: 2021-01-29T21:30:10.000Z
Duration: 4 min 33 s
Description: As Biden enters White House, world leaders express ‘relief’ and welcome ‘friend’ and ‘mate’ back

Edelman’s 2021 Trust Barometer shows that people’s trust in governments, NGOs and the media has plunged, with divergence growing between the elite and the rest

For Hong Kong, there is no question trust has fallen, but what else will a ‘special briefing’, in March, reveal?

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A member of an armed group and a Trump supporter meet during a rally in front of the closed Texas State Capitol in Austin, on January 17, amid unfounded claims of election fraud. Arguably, the first casualty of the Trump years has been trust. Photo: AFP

David Dodwell

Published: 5:30am, 30 Jan 2021Updated: 5:49am, 30 Jan 2021

For 21 years, public relations group Edelman has returned annually to an issue indispensable to the proper functioning of our societies: trust.

Its annual Trust Barometer may not be as robust as many academics would like – Edelman is, after all, a public relations agency, not an academic institution – but it has consistently revealed important insights about ourselves and the state of the countries we live in. And on the foundations of a survey of over 30,000 people across 27 countries, it cannot be ignored.

Unsurprisingly, the message at the heart of the 2021 Trust Barometer, released in New York earlier this month, is of trust being put severely to the test. For those of us emerging emotionally bruised and shell-shocked from the US presidential elections, and after a year of trauma around the Covid-19 pandemic, trust levels have crashed.

If US senator Hiram Johnson was right over 100 years ago that the first casualty of war is truth, then it is arguable today that the first casualty of the Donald Trump years has been trust.

As the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf observed: “The triumph of deceit, incompetence, unpredictability, indifference and xenophobia under Mr Trump has damaged trust in the US among its allies and respect for it among its opponents.”

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As Biden enters White House, world leaders express ‘relief’ and welcome ‘friend’ and ‘mate’ back

David Brooks, writing in October in The Atlantic on how “America is having a moral convulsion”, said: “Levels of trust in this country – in our institutions, in our politics, and in one another – are in precipitous decline. And when social trust collapses, nations fail.”