A disciple asks Confucius what a state needs to govern well, and he answers sufficient food, sufficient weapons and the trust of the people, and when pressed to say which could be given up first if forced to choose, he surrenders weapons, then food, but holds that trust must never be abandoned, since a state that has lost the trust of its people, he says, cannot stand at all, a ranking that places xin above even the material preconditions of survival in Confucius's own explicit statement of priorities.
The virtue operates at the personal as well as the political scale throughout the Analects, appearing in the disciple Zengzi's daily self examination, among the things he checks each day is whether he has been trustworthy in his dealings with friends, treating xin as a habit requiring constant, deliberate review rather than a fixed trait a person either has or lacks permanently. Xin is closely bound to the keeping of one's word specifically, the Chinese character combining a person and speech, a graphic etymology later commentators frequently note as capturing the virtue's core sense directly: to be a person whose word can be relied upon, promises made and kept rather than offered lightly and abandoned when inconvenient.