ABSTRACT
The professions and the role of professionals in revolutionary China have until recently received less attention than the role of intellectuals. Intellectuals’ cultural identity was based on the production of knowledge while the professional’s legitimacy was the claim to serve the nation through practice—the disinterested application of knowledge not dictated by government or the market. This chapter uses recent scholarship to re-examine the so-called “liberal professions”, such as lawyers, engineers, doctors, scholars and teachers, journalists, businessmen, clergy and creative writers and artists, who wanted to organize middle-class professions using the charisma of the West and modernization to build a strong and cosmopolitan Chinese nation. This liberal model was criticized by populists as selfish and elitist and by nativists as inappropriate to China. Late Qing and Republican governments fostered statist or corporatist professions and laid the foundation for the service professionals after 1949. Liberal activists responded with a sinification of liberalism to produce a professionalism that was effective and culturally Chinese.
