Abstract: With more attention to the study of trust, interpreting trust in different disciplines and sciences is becoming increasingly complex, so is the controversy about it. One of the most concerned issues is the tendency of researchers to divide trust into two kinds: special trust and universal trust. The advantage of such a division is for classification so that institutions and relations, and cultures and cultural differences can be conducted empirically. However, this paper contends otherwise. The author returns to common sense and cultural backgrounds to discuss trust, suggesting that trust can be divided into trust without or with constraint mechanisms based on its expressed characteristics. Such classification can reveal cultural differences in the expression of trust which may lead to trust zone shifting in social practices. In the Chinese culture, trust is formed in the intermediate zone when suspiciousness rises in social interaction. According to the degree of suspiciousness, the trust zone can be further subdivided into ease relations, trust relations, and notrust relations. These features are evidenced in Confucian discourses and the characteristics of Chinese human relations. The author holds that this classification originates in the structural biases of trust relations coming from the assumptions of human nature and its social dependence in the Chinese and Western cultures: the former is biased toward the socialnetwork control and the latter towards institutional constraints. But in either way, the essence of trust is spacetime maintenance of the object upon whom one is dependent when social members are facing heightened social uncertainty and complexity. If this comparative research framework is used to reprocess previous studies on China’s social trust controversy and perplex, including particularism and universalism, more reasonable explanations could be found for many aspects.

Key words: trust zone , constraint mechanism , ease relations , social network ,  , dependence assumption