The Development of Medical Science Popularization in China: A Narrative Review of Health Communication Research on Social Media

Abstract

Medical science popularization — known in Chinese scholarship as yixue kepu (医学科普) and closely aligned with the field of health communication — has undergone rapid transformation in China over the past decade. This shift has been propelled by the “Healthy China 2030” agenda, the proliferation of social media platforms such as Sina Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu, and the exigencies of public-health emergencies, most notably the COVID-19 pandemic, which laid bare both the efficacy and the vulnerabilities of large-scale health information dissemination. This paper presents a narrative review synthesizing English-language, peer-reviewed empirical studies on the evolution of health communication in mainland China. Following a structured search of PubMed/PMC, JMIR, Frontiers, PLOS ONE, and ScienceDirect for studies published between 2019 and 2025, ten empirical studies were selected for synthesis. The review is organized around five themes: institutional communication channels and governmental social media adoption; crisis communication during COVID-19; the diversification of communication actors, particularly the rise of medical social influencers; vaccine communication as a distinct sub-field; and the governance of health-related misinformation via platform-specific mechanisms. Key findings indicate that institutional adoption of social media has outpaced genuine interactivity, that narrative and affective framing consistently outperform purely informational messaging in eliciting engagement, that source credibility remains a pivotal driver of positive audience sentiment even within an influencer-saturated environment, and that the structural disparities between platforms — notably the weak-tie network of Weibo versus the strong-tie network of WeChat — produce measurably distinct dynamics for both the diffusion and the correction of misinformation. The review concludes by identifying critical research gaps, including the paucity of cross-platform and longitudinal designs and insufficient theoretical integration across source-credibility, dialogic-communication, and social-network-analysis traditions, and draws out implications for journalism, communication practice, and pedagogy in China.