REMIT’s latest dashboard, titled “Learning from Crisis: China’s Public Discussion on Genome-Editing Governance Post-He Jiankui Incident” visualises the work of Maastricht University researchers Catherine Yuk-Ping Lo and Hengyi Yang.
The new dashboard employs discourse network analysis (DNA) to visualize the China’s public discussion in response to the “He Jiankui Incident”, a Chinese scientist announced the birth of a pair of gene-edited babies in 2018, as well as how the suggested solutions expressed by technology elites impacted the subsequent acceleration of gene editing ethical regulations and legislation by the Chinese central government. This case indicates the policy process of how Chinese government learns from crisis incidents and learns to regulate emerging technologies.
The discourse network dataset was built based on a three-step process. Firstly, the original media reports were extracted from the Chinese Core Newspaper Database, which contains 632 important newspapers published in China since 2000. The keyword search of “He Jiankui Incident” (贺建奎事件) collected 160 relevant media reports between November 27, 2018 and September 27, 2023 from 56 newspapers published in China.
Secondly, researchers identified the actors who expressed their policy suggestions in response to the incident and recorded their affiliation. To concretely capture the suggestions, the three-tiered policy belief system in the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) was referred, which includes the actors’ deep core beliefs, policy core beliefs, and secondary aspects. Accordingly, a discourse network dataset containing 1061 statements expressed by 135 organizations covering 92 policy beliefs during the period was encoded.
Lastly, in order to understand how actors cluster with each other by proposing shared policy beliefs, the original two-mode network (actor-concept) was converted into a one-mode actor congruence network (ACN). The links between actors in the ACN indicate that they share at least one policy belief.
The dataset and investigation reveal that in response to the “He Jiankui Incident”, relevant policy actors in China’s policy system of bio-tech ethics formulated multiple advocacy coalitions focusing on various policy issues with the aim for policy influence. The major advocacy was for legislative regulation and administrative review for genome-editing babies, which were included in the policy documents after the incident. Therefore, at least in response to crisis incidents, the voices in public discussion had impacts on Chinese governments’ policy core beliefs and secondary aspect, which also indicates China’s policymaking process regarding governance over emerging technologies tends to adopt a bottom-up approach involving multiple stakeholders.
The data and results were presented by REMIT researchers Catherine Yuk-Ping Lo and Hengyi Yang at the “Global Health” Section of the 17th EISA PEC held at the Lille Catholic University and at the “Navigating the Geopolitics of Strategic Technology” Section of the 18th EISA PEC held at the University of Bologna.