Event, society, and future: Revisiting Chinese public discourse on the ‘gene-edited babies incident’

The 2018 ‘gene-edited babies incident’ in China catalysed intense global debate, highlighting the critical need to understand public discourse surrounding major techno-ethical controversies. This study investigates the characteristics of Chinese public discourse in response to this event by analysing 3692 comments from the social-media platform Weibo. Employing a mixed-methods approach combining latent Dirichlet allocation topic clustering and grounded theory, the research reveals a hierarchical thematic structure in public discussions. Such discussions are categorized into three types of discourse: (1) event-specific discourse, focusing on the incident itself, the individuals involved, subjects’ rights, the experimenter's ethics and the immediate ethical risks of the technology; (2) societal-context discourse, extending to broader societal issues reflected by the event, including techno-governance, the rule of law, international competition, science communication and popular-science education; and (3) future-oriented discourse, which adopted a macro-perspective to explore the necessity and historicity of technological development and its relationship with ethical constraints. While demonstrating diverse engagement, the analysis also identified prevalent issues in public cognition, such as superficial scientific understanding, pronounced emotional responses and a reliance on monolithic cultural logics. These findings underscore the importance of strengthening research on public techno-ethical cognition. The study advocates for the integration of public perspectives into techno-ethical governance frameworks to complement elite, unidirectional communication, thereby enhancing the inclusiveness, responsiveness and practical effectiveness of science governance in the face of rapid technological advances.