Abstract:  In modern society, individuals are likely to get involved with more and more strangers in life and work. Individuals’ generalized trust for strangers will impact their individual behavior and the social structure in the entire society as well. There is a pressing demand for research on generalized trust to get a clear and comprehensive picture of it. However, such research is rare in China, and more so in the area of regional variations in generalized trust. Furthermore, the separation of the macroperspective from the microperspective, it is hard to integrate the various factors that are influencing people’s generalized trust to reach a conclusion. Therefore, this study divided regional variations in generalized trust into two categories of withinregional and crossregional. On the basis of the literature, the authors proposed the resource factor theory (i.e., variations in resourcefulness affect trust) to explain the emergence of differences in generalized trust. This study divided resources into public resources and private resources, with the latter part further divided into obtainable resources (socioeconomic status) and loanable resources (social capital). Logistic regression model was applied in the analysis of the 2003 CGSS data. Here are the findings: (1) The rank order of Chinese urban residents’ generalized trust from the highest to the lowest is as follows: the east, the middle, and the west. Also, variations in the generalized trust were correlated with public resources. (2) The two types of resources at the microlevel (including individuals’ obtained resources and borrowed resources) were both positively correlated with the urban residents’ generalized trust within their regions but the degree of their effects varied with the resources at the macrolevel. 

Key words: generalized trust , social capital , socioeconomic status ,  regional variations