The rent-seeking behavior of enterprises not only breaks the order of fair competition in the Chinese market and causes market function failure, but it also disperses enterprises’ investments in effective production methods and innovation and causes distorted resource allocation, thus seriously impeding the sustainable and stable growth of the Chinese economy. In the existing research, the effects of general factors of the organization, such as the age, scale, and political connection of enterprises; formal institutional factors, such as the marketization level, degree of the rule of law, property rights protection level, and financial system environment of the region; and informal institutional factors, such as the power distance of the state, individualism, and cultural risk avoidance level, on the specific rent-seeking behavior of enterprises have been discussed. However, there are currently few studies on the relationship between social trust in informal institutions and the implicit rent-seeking behavior of enterprises. Therefore, in this paper, we use the data of all companies listed in the A-share market in China and the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) and apply the multiple regression analysis method to empirically study the relationship between social trust and the implicit rent-seeking behavior of enterprises and the moderating effects of poor performance and media attention on this relationship. This has both important theoretical and practical significance for understanding the effects of social trust on corporate governance in informal institutions in China and determining the means to restrain the implicit rent-seeking behavior of Chinese enterprises.In the literature review, the existing research on the effects of social trust on economic consequences and the causes of the rent-seeking behavior of enterprises are explained and the defects of the literature in these two fields are summarized. It is worth noting that the existing research has found that social trust is abused in certain rent-seeking activities of enterprises. However, the rent-seeking tendencies and behaviors of enterprises are holistic and penetrate into all aspects of the nonproductive activities of enterprises. If we only examine the effects of social trust on specific rent-seeking activities, then it is difficult to contrapuntally reveal the effects of social trust on the impact rent-seeking of enterprises, and the conclusions may be mutually contradictory. Therefore, this issue merits further discussion.Based on institutional theory, we conduct a theoretical analysis from the perspectives of external trust and revenue cost and proposes the main assumptions of this paper. Social trust mitigates the impact of the rent-seeking behavior of enterprises. From the perspective of enterprises’ sense of trust in the outside world, a low level of social trust decreases enterprises’ belief in the fairness of external market competition, thus promoting the enterprises to pursue a competitive advantage and protect their existing market positions through implicit rent-seeking. From the perspective of revenue cost, a high level of social trust increases the cost of implicit rent-seeking behavior and other violations for enterprises, thus decreasing the implicit rent-seeking motivation of enterprises. On this basis, according to performance feedback theory and the related theories of media governance function, we propose the following two assumptions: poor performance has an inverted U-shaped moderating effect on the relationship between social trust and the implicit rent-seeking behavior of enterprises, while media attention strengthens the negative relationship between social trust and the implicit rent-seeking behavior of enterprises.In the empirical analysis section, the descriptive statistics, a Pearson correlation matrix, a multiple regression analysis, a mechanism test, an endogeneity test, a robustness test, and further tests are summarized. The results of multiple regression show that the social trust and implicit rent-seeking behavior of enterprises are significantly negatively correlated, performance below the aspiration level exerts an inverted U-shaped moderating effect on the relationship between social trust and the implicit rent-seeking behavior of enterprises, and media attention strengthens the inhibitory effect of social trust on the implicit rent-seeking behavior of enterprises.These conclusions are robust to endogeneity and robustness tests. In the final part of the empirical analysis, the moderating effect of enterprise age on the relationship between social trust and the rent-seeking behavior of enterprise is examined. The time variation of the effect of social trust on the implicit rent-seeking behavior of enterprises is discussed. It is found that enterprise age significantly enhances the negative correlation between social trust and the implicit rent-seeking behavior of enterprises.The conclusion of this paper not only contrapuntally expands the research on the causes of the implicit rent-seeking behavior of enterprises but also enriches the literature on the effects of social trust on economic consequences. It has important significance for understanding how informal institutions in China affect the activities of enterprises.