The objective of the article is to determine how hedging affects readers’ perception of scientific facts. A corpus of 100 articles (150,000 words in total) from China Daily and People’s Daily, published between 2021–2022, was analyzed. This research expands the theory of scientific communication. Hedging in Chinese science journalism serves three primary functions, the first of which is the lexical calibration of certainty. Modal verbs and approximators attenuate the categorical force of assertions; readers appear to extract gradations of probability directly from the text rather than reconstructing them inferentially from the context. The second function is referential: accountability for a claim is redistributed from the author to the expert community via collective attributions and institutional citations. The third function is dialogic: hedging markers open a space for reader interpretation rather than foreclosing debate. Strictly speaking, hedging constitutes an invitation to counterargument.