When Science Meets Politics: Quoting Health Experts in Chinese Official Media

• In Event: Science, Trust, and Public Opinion

Abstract

Science communication is increasingly entangled with party politics. In recent years, contentious debates surrounding scientific topics such as climate change, vaccination, and genetically modified organisms have blurred the boundaries between science and politics, highlighting a clear trend of the politicization of science. Existing literature has primarily examined politicization tendencies among scientists in democratic societies, revealing that scientists often interpret research findings through their own political and ideological lenses (Gauchat, 2012; Pielke Jr, 2004; Scheufele, 2014). The multifaceted and intricate roles played by scientific experts present a compelling perspective for examining the phenomenon of the politicization of science(Gauchat, 2012; Scheufele, 2014). Nonetheless, there remains a notable gap in empirical research within non-Western contexts. What are the causes and indicators of science politicization in single-party states?
This study aims to bridge this gap by investigating the politicization of science within the context of the Chinese party-state, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study. To conduct our analysis, we collect comprehensive Weibo data from the official accounts of People’s Daily (N=28,702) and Xinhua News Agency (N=39,670) covering the entire duration of China’s pandemic control (January 2020 to December 2022). We identify all posts containing the names of health experts. Employing LDA topic modeling method, our paper investigates that there are four main functions of science communication initiated by government, including Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge, Information Publicity, Policy Endorsement and Justification, and Positive Energy Advocacy. The politicization of science in China is consistently manifested in the latter two functions.
When we focus on the role of health experts cited by official media, we uncover an intriguing phenomenon of Selective Citation of Health Experts in Chinese official media coverage. Our research confirms that Chinese official media exhibit a preference for selecting authoritative experts who work within the Party system and support the Zero-COVID policy for media coverage. Additionally, scientific experts serve the purposes of disseminating knowledge, information publicity, promoting positive messaging, and endorsing policies during Covid-19 pandemic. The results of Poisson regression models indicate that during worsening epidemic situations, when policy stringency differences between China and other countries widen, or when public concerns regarding COVID-19 rise, Chinese official media tends to cite experts more frequently than usual. The experts’ discourse on the COVID-19 pandemic has undergone changes at different periods. For example, at the stage of “dynamic zero COVID policy”, the mainstream media often reported the pathogenicity and infectivity of the virus in large pages, emphasizing the harm and possible sequelae of the virus; while after adjusting the strict policy, the mainstream media began to focus on explaining Omicron’s low severe disease rate and low fatality rate to demonstrate the rationality of policy adjustments.
Our paper introduces a novel perspective on the politicization of science in authoritarian regimes. It focuses on the selective citation of experts by official media during the COVID-19 pandemic, surpassing the traditional examination of scientific information control and censorship. By analyzing comprehensive Weibo data during the pandemic, it enriches our understanding of how scientific discourse becomes politicized under China’s party-state system, revealing the multi-faceted role of scientific experts in politics. In China’s party-state system, when discussing politicized scientific issues, scientific discourse doesn’t entirely give way to political discourse. Instead, the politicization of science shows its flexible nature, where the Chinese government strategically leverages scientific professionals as endorsers rather than relying on rigid propaganda tactics. This paper sheds light on a unique dimension of the interplay between science and politics in authoritarian settings and offers valuable insights for the study of Chinese propaganda.
Our study also compares the different causes and manifestations of the politicization of science between single-party states and multi-party states. In most western democratic countries, the ongoing politicization of science is a result of the increasingly political and polarized contemporary societal environment(Farrell, 2016; Lupia, 2013). On the contrary, in single-party states such as China, the politicization of science follows a “performance-based logic”, which means governments need to use scientific discourse to promote their good performance and justify their legitimacy. As a result, under the concentrated coverage of mainstream media, scientific discourse in single-party states always exhibits a high degree of homogeneity.

Authors

• Bingyan Wang, Tsinghua University

• Kaiping Zhang, Tsinghua University