Abstract: Using the data from the 2009 JSNET project, the present study explores the role of social eating on political trust among urban residents in eight Chinese cities. Based on a critical review of the existing literature, the authors of this article propose the hypothesis that social eating has corrosive effects on political trust, and identify social mechanisms through which guanxi  capital exerts its role. Using the instrumental variable ordinal Probit model, we have confirmed the negative effects of social eating, and analyzed how these effects are differentiated between and among social groups defined by institution, gender, education, and region. We show that there are significant negative effects of social eating on different dimensions of political trust, and the effects are different across social groups. Findings in this paper reveal that the process of accumulating, maintaining and mobilizing guanxi  capital via social eating among urban Chinese often comes with side effects at the society level.  Unlike traditional social capital studies, we focus on negative roles of socializing to unpack the association between trust and guanxi  capital. Although social eating is not the only way to generate and maintain guanxi  capital among the Chinese, it is the most important channel under the Chinese context. Although the corrosive role of social eating in itself is not a proof for the direct effect of social capital on politics, it can be seen as a byproduct of the social capital process. That is, a certain type of social behavior can both increase social capital and impair political trust simultaneously.

Key words: social capital  ,   social eating ,  , political trust  ,   instrumental variable,    guanxi capital