This paper aims to apprehend self-professional identity construction via other-identity deconstruction in Chinese televised debating discourses. It argues that professional identity construction is the dynamic and interrelational act of staging, proposing, negotiating, disputing or controlling one's own and others’ professional role features, competence and ethics in a particular sociocultural discourse context. Speakers in televised debates deconstruct their interlocutors’ professional identity as nonexpert; deconstruct their interlocutors professional role as outsiders stereotyped with negative features; and deconstruct their interlocutors’ identity into artificial identities, to wit crafted, problematic and fragmented identities. This study has developed Bucholtz and Hall's (2005) principles of identity construction and Van Dijk's (2000) principles of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation.