Editor's note: Hannan Hussain is a foreign affairs commentator and author. He is a Fulbright recipient at the University of Maryland, the U.S., and a former assistant researcher at the Islamabad Policy Research Institute. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Public trust in government has risen to 91 percent – the highest in a decade – while citizen trust in institutions jumped 11 points to 83 percent, according to the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer, a global survey that has polled over 36,000 respondents in over two dozen countries, revealing a telling contrast between popular support in China and the "collapse of trust" in democracies.

Plenty has been observed this past year. To Beijing's credit, its strategies on stimulating economic growth and ensuring consistent gains against the COVID-19 pandemic have continuously put the Chinese public front and center. Inoculation levels remained high, health protocols swiftly implemented, and the government's prompt mobilization of resources against the smallest of COVID-19 flare-ups made sure that a message of high confidence stood communicated to its masses. At the same time, China walked the talk on the economic front – rising citizen incomes, stable economic growth, highest-ever trade surplus, and controlled unemployment, all demonstrating a consistency on the government's part to deliver on its policy promises.

That very sense of policy predictability – in the words of Richard Edelman, whose company conducted the global survey – reflects "a coherence between what is done and what is said."

It is also worth wondering why the same cannot be said with complete confidence about many democracies studied by the survey. A collapse of public trust in their institutions offers some clues. Consider the fact that public trust in institutions hovers below 50 percent in many of these democracies – a cluster that includes the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom. It is also striking to not see a single Western democracy with institutions trusted by two-thirds of its public. Given the significant role that institutions play in cultivating and reinforcing public trust, it is a staggering sight.

All this warrants a close look at the notion that democracies, by virtue of their ideological make-up, are best positioned to tailor governance to the needs of their people.

China's long-term approach to strategic planning indicates some parallels with what the survey identifies as key elements of societal stability. Consider the prescription provided by the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer that leadership must focus on "long-term thinking" and put "solutions over divisiveness."

It is here that China's integration of high-quality development measures, carbon reduction goals, and economic transformation objectives into its 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025), is a manifestation of its long-term vision put into practice. From advances on state air quality standards, to broadening the pool of small- and medium-sized enterprises contributing to future growth, a common focus on putting "long-term thinking over short-term gain" and "solutions over divisiveness" can be observed, according to the survey report.

It is also clear that China's institutional response has been overwhelming in terms of cultivating what the survey calls "belief in [a] society's ability to build a better future." For instance, business – the most trusted institution in the global survey vis-à-vis the government, media and NGOs – clocked their highest level of trust in China at 84 percent.

On the back of such gains, China makes a strong case of diverging from what the survey separately notes is a "cycle of distrust" fueled by the government and media in many nations.

With nearly two-thirds of Chinese people still confident that they and their families "will be better off in five years' time," perhaps it is in the interests of democracies to learn what informs China's soaring public trust levels, and what it means to genuinely cultivate a lasting sense of confidence in the public.

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