Objective/Meaning  This paper was to clarify the influence mechanism of rural residents’ sense of social justice on the government trust, so as to provide empirical evidence for improving the rural residents’ trust in the government.

  Methods/Procedures  By using the sampling data of rural residents in the CSS2019 data, a chain mediating effect model including the political identity and the satisfaction towards governments’ work was constructed to analyze the mechanism of rural residents’ sense of social justice affecting the government trust and the magnitude of the mediating effect of different paths was compared.

  Results/Conclusions  The sense of social justice had a significant positive impact on the rural residents’ trust in the government; The political identity and the satisfaction towards governments’ work respectively played a mediating role, and together constituted a chained mediating effect, among which, the satisfaction towards governments’ work had the strongest mediating effect. Therefore, it was suggested to improve the rural residents’ trust in the government in various ways by focusing on promoting the social fairness through multiple channels, supplemented by improving the public’s satisfaction with governments’ work and political identity.