Evidential Strategies in Chinese Social‐Mediated Communication: A Digital Conversation‐Analytic Approach

ABSTRACT This article aims to expand upon existing research on evidentiality in asynchronous online communication when the language of Covid‐19 has been circulating in China's public discourse since late 2019. Drawing upon the methodology informed by digital conversation analysis, we conducted in‐depth research to identify and characterize Chinese Internet users’ evidential strategy use in social debates on Zhihu, the most popular community question‐answering site in China. We examined how participants cite sources of evidence and demonstrate their commitment to the reliability of evidence in two types of comments regarding the efficacy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for treating Covid‐19: adjacent exchanges and retro‐sequences. The analysis reveals explicit, strategic language use in TCM comments that references external sources to support arguments and draws upon prior comments to challenge existing viewpoints or initiate re‐formulations. A patterned use of evidential strategies can be observed in both the first and second positions within the TCM comment threads. The first position is predominantly characterized by a clear manifestation of the participant's commitment to the information source in the original post. In contrast, the second position sees frequently used interrogative expressions, particularly rhetorical questions, to challenge the validity of the evidence presented in the first position. We concluded that evidential strategy use in Zhihu comments provides important functional motivations for participants’ production and management of evidence‐based meaning for goal‐oriented digital communication.