A tale of tradition and modernization

Abstract This paper aims to examine the conceived self-identities by Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) doctors in the digitalized scenarios of healthcare. With the textual posts collected from Sina Microblog, this study systematically analyzed 474 pieces of narrative posts (97,737 Chinese characters) of TCM doctors who were officially registered on Sina Microblog. Results indicate that TCM doctors normally envisaged three types of self-identities on Sina Microblog: modern professionals, tradition defenders, and cultural inheritors. Specifically, solution-oriented, emotion-oriented, and legitimation-oriented strategies were discursively adopted by some TCM doctors to express their acceptance of digitalization, whereas various linguistic devices were employed to resist digitalization in TCM, such as analogies, rhetorical questions, and the usage of attitudinal markers. This study contributes to existing knowledge of the evolution of TCM through digitalization by pragmatically examining the identity work of TCM doctors under online circumstances in Oriental scenarios.