Media reports last month said watermelons planted on more than 46.7 hectares had exploded in the eastern province of Jiangsu. Although agricultural experts said the freak occurrence resulted from poorly-timed use of a growth accelerator, which is often used safely, watermelon sales remain low.
The Chinese scientific community is losing credibility with the public.
In recent years the public has also questioned expert explanations of scientific issues such as transgenic crops, nuclear power and mobile phone radiation.
Experts said that people should not be worried about mobile phone radiation, while most people still believe it can cause brain cancer and other diseases. And the public panicked in April despite experts saying that nuclear leakage in Japan would not affect China.
Has something gone wrong with science?
Popular science, a term used to describe communication between the scientific community and the public, not only teaches scientific knowledge, but sometimes praises science as the only truth of our modern lives, said Jiang Xiaoyuan, professor of science history at Shanghai Jiaotong University.
"If you look at books about science popularization, none of them say science should be questioned," he said. The message is that "science is truth, and that's how people learn about it."
In fact, science should only be taken as relative truth, hich is far from perfect, especially since some technologies may have side effects that people should know about in order to protect themselves. Because of this, the reconstruction of science has been going on in many developed countries for years.
According to Jiang, China's scientific community is in slow motion compared to the public in terms of reconstructing science.
"People could hardly find books talking about the side effects of nuclear power plants after the Japanese nuclear crisis, because there are only books praising the effectiveness and cleanness of the energy," Jiang said. "This question (of not telling the other side of the story) leaves us, the scientific community, speechless."
Similarly, food science and technology experts rarely talk about the danger of food addictives, and communication experts shun the question of mobile phone radiation.
But the public has figured out the reason for this dishonesty: as a crucial aspect of China's fast-growing economy, the government chooses to turn a blind eye to such defects, even as companies deliberately downplay detrimental side effects for commercial gain and "experts" on the payroll give false testimony.
Educated citizens tend to be more suspicious of scientific facts, said Li Daguang, professor at the science communication center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
"Now it is happening in China," he said.
The public suspects arrogance in the field of popular science, in which science becomes a toy for certain experts while ordinary people can only be passive listeners or readers.
"Science popularization should be more interactive with the public, so they can conduct their own research and raise questions," Li said. "We are looking for dialogue, not a lecture, between experts and people."
