ABSTRACT
As the world has entered the twenty-first century, what Harold Perkin described and predicted some years ago-the rise of professional society (or the third revolution), with all its benefits and pitfalls-is very much a fact of life, albeit still evolving, in most parts of the globe (Perkin 1989). China is no exception. Moving out of and away from the Mao era (1949-76), during which de-professionalization was forced upon the population (especially its educated segments), China has seen the re-emergence of professional groups, such as lawyers, doctors, accountants, architects, and journalists, as well as the growth of many occupational groups striving to be recognized as professions, from nurses, artists, fashion designers and social workers, to psychiatrists (the latter three disciplines are quite recent creations), to name only a few. Although all these developments may be regarded as results of the postMao reforms, fundamentally they manifest a secular trend in the economic transformation and related social reconfiguration that originated in the early twentieth century. In other words, they represent a resumption of the same trajectories that were unfolding during the Republican era (1912-49) and were interrupted by the Mao era (Xu 2001: 278-83).
