ABSTRACT

Employing New Institutional Sociology theory, this paper investigates how and why China’s professional accounting education (PAE) was shaped in its own way from emerging, disappearing, re-started, and fast development stages over a century. We find that the development of PAE in China is actually a complex coercive, normative, and mimetic isomorphic process, which provides a comprehensive understanding of contemporary China’s PAE from institutional perspectives, benefiting the exchange and collaboration of accounting education among countries. The paper updates and enriches the literatures of PAE development in China.