ABSTRACT
Professionals such as doctors, lawyers and university professors are usually
regarded as central elements of the middle classes. While the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) certainly has substantial numbers of doctors and
university professors, and growing numbers of lawyers, these professional
classes are not certainly part of that country’s new rich. In the first place in
relative terms professionals such as doctors, university professors and those
engaged in legal affairs are more automatically to be sited as part of the
established middle class between the establishment of the PRC in 1949 and the start of the reform era in the late 1970s. In the second place, though it is
clear that certain professionals, and even some doctors, lawyers and uni-
versity professors have benefited disproportionately from reform policies
and the marketization of the economy in general, change has proved to be
more variable, even in large numbers of cases leaving professionals as less
comfortably off than previously if not quite the ‘new poor’.
