ABSTRACT
Focusing on small-scale, cross-border trade between China’s Heilongjiang Province and Russia’s Primorye Region, this chapter explores the intricate relationship between individual economic strategies, trust, and the state from an ethnographic perspective. Investigating the paramount role of trust in informal economic operations, I argue that shifting intensities in people’s loyalty ties have created new forms of economic cooperation that transcend the logic of a national economy. Informal economic solutions, based on personal trust networks, become an alternative to the loyalty ties involved in the trust of the state and its institutions. Trust embedded in often shady enterprises seems to be a counterweight for the lack of trust in official structures and mechanisms. The seemingly paradoxical situation of the simultaneous existence of low levels of systemic trust and high levels of interpersonal trust is thus two sides of the same coin, indicating a subtle shift away from loyalty to the state towards networks of interpersonal loyalties.
