Chinese Professionals and the Republican State: The Rise of Professional Associations in Shanghai, 1912-1937 (review)

The historiography of Shanghai in the republican period has burgeoned during the past two decades. There is now a large body of work on the laborers of the city and a fairly large one on its compradors and native capitalists. To date, however, there has been no work either in English or Chinese on those categorized by the Guomindang after 1939 as "free professionals" (ziyou zhiye zhe). This study of the city's self-employed and salaried professionals, who numbered about twenty thousand by the mid-1930s, is thus greatly to be welcomed. Xiaoqun Xu's focus is on those who perceived themselves as serving the public weal through their specialized, formally certificated knowledge, their autonomous organization, and their disinterested professional ethics. Xu concentrates, in particular, on lawyers, doctors, journalists, and, to a lesser extent, accountants.

Xu begins by analyzing the material and cultural consumption patterns of professionals, demonstrating that they were by no means a homogeneous group, whether judged in terms of their income, lifestyle, social prestige, or cultural and political attitudes. The average lawyer, for example, earned from 100 to 200 yuan a month, an average journalist from 70 to 300 yuan, and a moderately successful native physician up to 900 yuan. Such salaries, which were comparable to those of Chinese employees of the Shanghai Municipal Council with secondary or higher education, were vastly in excess of the wages of a manual worker—even the most skilled—and considerably higher than the salaries of white-collar and supervisory workers (zhiyuan). Xu shows that professionals shared a lifestyle similar to that of gentry-merchants, capitalists, and managers, but were set apart from these groups by their aspirations and ethos. Nevertheless, and against the recent tendency to stress the amorphousness of the social structure of Shanghai, Xu rightly insists that professionals were part of an emergent bourgeoisie, in spite of internal stratification, and that modern class formation was under way in China's largest commercial and industrial city.

In the second part of the book Xu examines the process of professionalization of these groups that got underway following the 1911 Revolution. Lawyers were the best-organized profession in Shanghai, whereas journalists were slow to forge a professional association and to acquire a professional ethos, becoming effective only with the national crisis of the 1930s. Doctors in Western-style and native medicine fell somewhere between these two groups in terms of their success in achieving professional recognition. By setting these efforts to professionalize in the wider context of the evolution of public organizations in Shanghai, Xu is able to show convincingly that professional organizations were unambiguously urban and modern in their origins and functions, distinct not only from "traditional" organizations, such as guilds and native-place associations, but also from "transitional" organizations, such as the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce or the Shanghai Bankers' Association, both of which made use of native-place, kinship, and various informal ties. He argues persuasively that professional associations were neither voluntary civic organizations nor official state organizations: professionals associated voluntarily, yet the battle to enforce professional standards and to obtain professional status necessitated recognition and regulation by the state. The Shanghai Bar Association, for example, functioned very effectively in representing the professional and political interests of the city's lawyers, yet government regulation eventually made it mandatory for all lawyers to be members of it.

The republican state needed professionals to staff its apparatus, to rationalize the appropriation of social resources, and to expand its reach into society. It thus promoted professionalization in the interests of state-building, paying most attention to the regulation of the legal profession in order to create an efficient judicial system and because the foreign powers demanded it as a quid pro quo for the relinquishment of extraterritoriality. Xu shows that even in...