By the support of the party and governments，the building of a professional team of social workers has achieved tremendous improvements.Based on the literatures written by social work academics and officials，this article is aimed to summarise two discourses—professionalisation，and de-professionalisation，and then put their arguments into critical analysis against the background of China.It was found that the discourse of professionalisation attributed the development of social work in China to economic reform，while the other discourse of de-professionalisation argued that the social construction of professional social work had been closely related to the authoritarian state，scientific-oriented theories and indigenised social work.Meanwhile，both of the two discourses tended to explain the current development of professional social work in China either “naively” or “exaggeratively”.This article suggests that searching for the balance between professionalisation and de-professionalisation should become an important direction for future research.