Empowerment" is the most important professional theme since social work generated as a profession. Empowerment now is widely applied in various social and practice areas beyond social work profession as a philosophy and policy perspective in the recent 30 years, and has become a social discourse existing in society. Differing from the traditional patriarchal benefactor and liberator approaches, empowerment does not attempt to put the client to the professional level nor direct them to the goal made and described by the experts independently, it emphasizes the client’s participation and maintains the interaction between the workers and their clients. It also takes the client as subjects who has his own values, and can set up a goal of action for him self. This article traced the practice, political and philosophical basis of empowerment through identifying the main concepts of power, powerlessness and empowerment to fill the knowledge gap exiting in the current academic community of mainland China, and finally generalized the social work practice model of empowerment approach.
