More engagement but less participation: China’s alternative approach to public communication of science and technology

1. Tremendous progress in science communication

The China Association for Science and Technology (CAST), the engine for the country’s public communication of science, proudly announced in early-2021 that the scientifically literate public surpassed the benchmark 10% of the population (China Reading Weekly, 2021). Literacy was evaluated using an internationally comparable methodology (Zhu, 2017). The announcement came at a time when China had successfully controlled the disastrous COVID-19 pandemic. Although the pandemic control was essentially a result of massive lockdown measures, Chinese people have shown an extremely high level of voluntary compliance with measures to control the disease (Hu et al., 2021; Jia and Luo, 2021).

Other advances are similarly encouraging. According to the Chinese Association of Natural Science Museums, by 2019, science museums certified by the association have reached 293 from nine in 10 years ago (Xinyu Zhang et al., 2021b). The Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) data indicated that 2.7 billion attendances of science communication activities, both on-site and online, were recorded in 2020, an annual increase of 138%. The activities included 846,600 science popularization lectures, 110,000 science exhibitions, and 28,200 popular science contests (Liu, 2021). CAST was also pushing ahead an ambitious new action plan, the new mid- and long-term scientific literacy plan (2021–2035), which promised to increase funding and beneficial policies dramatically, boost science education in schools, and promote institutional science communication activities (Z. Zhang, 2021).

Science communication activities by non-official entities, including individual scientists, popular science sites and social media channels, and private science communication organizations, are even more exciting. A group of online science celebrities has reached millions of audiences (Wang et al., 2018). A trendy online lecture March to Mars attracted 30 million views (Jia et al., 2017). Public accounts on WeChat or other social media platforms are booming (Harwit, 2016), and hundreds of such accounts are professionally involved in science communication (Jin et al., 2017). While most social media science accounts are focused on sharing scientific knowledge in what is branded as “deficit model,” more and more scientific misconducts are now exposed online, helping to discipline the scientific community. The penetration of social media and the rise of these non-official science accounts seem to empower some scientists to become whistleblowers while encouraging more scientists to try to take the role of public communicators (Jia et al., 2021).

2. The eclipse of public debate

However, the atmosphere for science communication has dramatically changed in China. When drafting the abovementioned PUS essay in 2012, we briefly mentioned our observation:

. . . individual researchers and NGOs are engaging in pilot projects of public participation in science, including the country’s first pilot consensus conference in 2009, which initiated rational dialogues on genetically modified (GM) crops. Another scheme to exchange roles between journalists and scientists was carried out by the China Science Media Centre in 2011 with expected success. (Jia and Liu, 2014: 36)

We thought of this as a candle of hope for more dialogic science communication initiatives in China. Unfortunately, the candle has not ignited fire across the nation. The open debates on GM organisms (GMOs; Yuan, 2010), potentially polluting chemicals (Jia, 2014), trash incineration (Huang, 2015), and hydropower projects (Jia, 2021) organized by civil society organizations in the 2000s and early-2010s nearly disappeared in around the mid-2010s.

While declining public debates could be attributed to the decline of critical civil society organizations, which used to be major sponsors of such debates, the online censorship’s infringement on traditionally safe issues of science communication should also be blamed. The level of censorship often depends on whether the debated topics are politically sensitive or whether they trigger huge online visits (King et al., 2013). Nonetheless, not everything is censored. The elitist debate on whether China should build a super collider involving many leading scientists, including Nobel Laureate Yang Chen-Ning, a firm opponent, was not interfered with by the government (Jia, 2016).

However, a new factor emerged against dialogic science communication—the patriotic young netizens, the so-called “Little Pink” (Fang and Repnikova, 2018). In 2021, several science communication organizations or social media outlets, including the famous Scientific Squirrel, an organization consisting of enthusiastic science writers, and PaperClip, a leading social media-based popular science outlet, were buried by a flood of angry criticism expressed by the young netizens for their critical narratives of China, such as China’s overfishing in oceans. The founders of Scientific Squirrel eventually closed it, and PaperClip was banned on nearly all Chinese social media platforms (Henochowicz, 2021).

3. Public engagement versus participation

So, what have we learned so far? On one side of the coin, there is a booming picture of science communication in China: hundreds of science museums, more interactive and attractive communication projects, more funding and encouraging policies, and flourishing social media accounts and celebrities popularizing science online. But on the other side, open debates, consensus conferences, the public hearing for science, and other initiatives that support the lay public to question science policies, have disappeared from view.

Can the situation be called PES? In the classic sense of the term, which stresses the public’s right in policymaking regarding science (Irwin and Wynne, 2003), it seems not. The classic meaning is focused on the political dimension (Lewenstein, 2016). Yet, in the sense that science communication becomes more engaging and inclusive, mainly through various online channels, it is hard to deny the ongoing PES in China. The public is increasingly “engaged” by diversified science stuff in increasingly interactive ways. The algorithm logic only needs them to pay with their click and then advertisers will pay for the audience’s attention. What they do not have is the nominal participation in the policymaking process.

Yet, the lack of nominal participation does not mean the public view is neglected. The suspension of the super collider project is one example. In my book, Science in Movements (Jia, 2021), I have traced the social, political, communication, and knowledge control factors (Hilgartner, 2017) that have jointly suspended or delayed the Chinese government’s decisions to commercialize GM crops, build more dams and develop inland nuclear power plants.

The purpose of this article is not to make normative or stereotyped judgments. After all, critical essays presented in the previous PUS special issue on PES claim that PES in Europe and North America has not achieved an ideal deliberative democracy either (e.g. Nowotny, 2014). A recent review of PES case studies found that PES projects worldwide are highly centralized, and the deficit science communication models are still common (De Loureiro et al., 2021).

Therefore, reexamination of what makes China different in its science communication should be more nuanced than simply blaming its lack of public participation. Luckily, with more and more empirical studies primarily carried out by overseas-trained Chinese science communication scholars, the task of depicting “China’s differences” has become easier.

4. From engaging the public to engaging scientists

One crucial aspect is investigating how scientists communicate science to the public differently in the Chinese context. As in Europe and North America (Besley et al., 2013; Besley and Nisbet, 2013), Chinese scientists take on a high moral obligation to educate the public (Wang and Jia, 2017). However, Chinese scientists differ in that they rely highly on their organizations in the communication process (Jia et al., 2018a; Jin et al., 2018). Given CAST and government agencies’ consistently promoting research institutions for public outreach, there are reasons to believe that scientists in China will be more and more involved in communicating science to the public. It is, therefore, necessary to probe the implications to science communication of this reliance of scientists on their organization.

One study, as expected, found that Chinese scientists’ media contacts were highly associated with the frequency with which they talked with their PIOs (public information officers; Jia et al., 2018b). But the same dataset showed Chinese scientists’ perception of institutional censorship was statistically positively associated with their media contacts. Should not awareness of censorship discourage Chinese scientists? Our follow-up interviews with scientists and PIOs at a large research university in central China indicated that many scientists were wary of media outlets’ request for payment in order to propagandize their research achievements. The sense of censorship comforted rather than upset them.

Separately, in an unpublished survey to examine Chinese scientists’ intention to communicate about COVID-19 to the public at the early stage of the pandemic, my colleagues and I found that the more surveyed scientists thought they had received sufficient science communication training, the less likely they would communicate COVID-19 to the public, utterly contrary to the widely held view on the positive role of self-efficacy. (The measurement of self-efficacy commonly covers whether the surveyed scientists believe they have received science communication training; Dudo, 2013). We guessed Chinese scientists’ organization reliance also caused this. It is also possible that science communication training provided by the Chinese research institutions might stress the need to keep silent on certain issues.

But, at the early stage of COVID-19, featuring massive lockdowns, the organized science communication in ordinary research institutions seemed nonexistent, which discouraged these “privileged scientists” from communicating COVID-related science to the public. As a result, only officially authorized and supported (in the sense they have access to much of the newest epidemiological data) top medical scientists like Zhong Nanshan, Li Lanjuan or Zhang Wenhong play the role of speaking to the public (Yu, 2020).

Whether this is true, Chinese scientists’ reliance on organizational incentives for science communication seems undeniable. Science communication scholars need to explore the underlying mechanism of this specific context to better understand Chinese scientists’ communication behaviors.

5. The role of social media

Chinese scientists’ online communication is one example of empowerment by social media. As in other parts of the world, social media such as Weibo and WeChat enabled multiple social actors to generate diversified discourses in topics ranging from GMOs (Xu et al., 2018), genomic editing (Xing Zhang et al., 2021a), traditional Chinese medicine (Zhu and Horst, 2019), and China’s space program (Y. Zhang, 2021a). A common phenomenon is the appearance of messages and views protesting orthodoxy discourses, sometimes through artistic forms (Wang et al., 2021; Yang, 2021). Another meaningful contribution of social media to science communication is the development of citizen science communicators, particularly with the emergence of question-answer site Zhihu, the Chinese equivalent of Quora (Liang et al., 2019; Yang, 2021).

However, whether the multiple social actors and diversified discourses they create can promote public participation in policymaking in China remains to be seen, even though they have influenced the online agenda. Empirical studies have indicated that even communication savvy Chinese scientists are reluctant to dialogue with the public (Jia et al., 2017). If they talk, they consciously maintain boundary work with discourses and symbols (Yang, 2022). Apparently, the democratic dream regarding science communication through social media has not been realized in China (Fan et al., 2013; Jia et al., 2014).

6. Attitudinal polarization, collectivism, and their impacts

While social media has not facilitated equal dialogue as expected, it has caused attitudinal polarization—ranging from climate change to COVID-19. China is not an exception (Li and Jin, 2019). Attitudinal polarization is often associated with the politicization of science (Bolsen and Druckman, 2015). Difficulty in evaluating political attitude on the left-right spectrum, partly because of censorship, has resulted in fewer empirical studies on the issue in China; however, some researchers managed to employ big data to show that left-leaning ideology on China’s social media Weibo is generally associated with anti-GMO attitude (Zhang and Sun, 2018).

Polarization and its effects prompt reconsideration of some long-held simplistic views, such as the direct link between knowledge and attitude. In a sense, this is a goal of the science of science communication, which begs examination of science communication dynamics in the politicized environment (Lupia, 2013; Scheufele, 2014).

In general, scientific literacy—which measures both knowledge and familiarity with scientific methods—predicts a high level of support for both science in general (He et al., 2016) and the official stances in disputed science issues like climate change and GMOs (Huang et al., 2016; Ren et al., 2016a), as well as smarter health behaviors during the COVID-19 (Chu et al., 2020; Jia and Luo, 2021). Yet, in the highly controversial GMO issue, higher education level was found to be associated with increased risk perception regarding the technology (Cui and Shoemaker, 2018; Ren et al., 2016a). This may indicate a cognitive process much more complicated than the simplistic link between scientific literacy and attitude. Knowledge might be interacting with other factors, particularly contextual factors, to influence attitude toward science (Sturgis and Allum, 2004). This point, which is consistent with the science of science communication appeal, has not been tested by empirical studies in China (Jia, 2020).

My colleague and I also found that while higher scientific literacy is linked to lower COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs among the Chinese public, its role is relatively weak. Much stronger is the predictive power of nationalism on faith in corresponding types of conspiracy theories (nationalists are likelier to believe theories claiming COVID-19’s US origin; Luo and Jia, 2021). This is strong evidence for the impact of polarization on science communication in China. More studies are needed to examine non-COVID-19 scenarios.

Findings linking Chinese citizens’ nationalism and their COVID-19 preventive behaviors (Hu et al., 2021; Jia and Luo, 2021) prompts speculation about relationships between health behavior and other cultural values, in particular, that of collectivism, which are generally neglected in mainstream models for health behaviors, such as the theory of planned behavior or health belief model. Although during health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, collectivism’s link to health behaviors is not unique to China (Lu et al., 2021); the high-profile encouragement of collectivism by the country’s official ideology and cultural tradition may also lead the value to play a role in other more regular healthcare and science-learning settings. No doubt science communication research should further examine this possibility.

7. A concluding remark for an alternative research agenda

Summarizing China’s science communication developments and relevant scholarly observations, this essay explores what the uniqueness of China’s science communication may imply to the classic themes in the field—PES, scientists’ communication, scientific literacy, and attitudinal changes. The empirical research results are not enough to answer all questions related to the ambitious goal to systematically examine what makes China different. But, compared to 10 years ago, when PUS published its special issue on PES, we already have much more to share.

We have grounds to hope that when PUS publishes a special issue celebrating its next decade, more studies will have been employed to enable us to answer more questions—for example, the policy consequences of public engagement versus public participation in the digital era, the impact of strongly organized science communication, the role of censorship, and the influence of collectivistic culture in scientific information acquisition and health behaviors, and so on. Undoubtedly, answering these questions will enable us to better investigate China’s alternative science communication approach and its theoretical implications.