This study explores how the application of democratic rule in land reform decision-making determines villagers’ political trust towards different levels of the government in China. Based on analyses of a two-period household survey data we find that in China’s most recent Collective Forest Tenure Reform, the use of democratic rule improves villagers’ trust for town and county cadres, whereas the impact on trust towards village cadres is only significant for the democracy involving all the villagers or households in a village. This pattern of trust is partly explained by our findings that the democratic process helped decrease the unresolved inter-village forestland disputes whilst there seems no such impact on the within-village land disputes. Heterogeneity analyses show that democratic decision-making has a more pronounced effect in improving trust for villagers with lower income, and those without affiliation with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or to the village committee.