Chapter II
THE POLITICAL ORGANS OF THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT
By constitutional stipulation, and by dogma legally established, the National Government of the Chinese Republic is a Kuomintang Party-dictatorship over the Chinese nation. This rule is formally dictatorship by a minority democracy over the absolutely governed majority, since the Party constitution requires intra-Party democracy. No pretense is made of further formal democracy. Actual experience of the past ten years has shown the government to be a broad, loosely organized oligarchy in which the Party, the Government, the Army and regional military, and independent leaders (such as bankers, college professors and presidents, secret society chiefs, community spokesmen) have shared power. The center of gravity has stayed somewhere near Chiang K'ai-shek, who as co-leader and then formal Chief (Tsung-ts'ai, "general ruler") of the Party and creator of the central army has combined two of the chief sources of influence. Variety in the sources, nature, and incidence of political power in recent Chinese affairs has, however, not destroyed the constitutional theory: Party-dictatorship pledged to national democracy.
The state machinery—as it has been since promulgation of the Provisional Constitution, 1931—is among the most elaborate in the modern world, but is nevertheless effective. One may justly regard the present government as the most efficacious, generally powerful, and growing Chinese government since the mid-eighteenth century. This government is pre-eminently the creation of the Kuomintang, and of Kuomintang leaders. A war which threatens China's national existence accordingly threatens the leaders as government officers, as Party members, as patriotic citizens, and as members of the Chinese race. At the time that they fight an alien enemy, they must simultaneously increase state power and diffuse it so that a democracy may emerge and survive.
China's leadership is therefore posed a two-fold problem: to perpetuate a regime, successful in one period of relative peace, through years of invasion to a period of even deeper peace; and to permit popular access to policy-forming agencies, allowing freer operation of pressures, without endangering resistance and reconstruction thereby. To the Western political scientist, it is amazing that they have carried into the years of catastrophic war a unique, complex constitutional system, treasuring it like an ark of the covenant. This is the five-power system.
The Five-Power Constitution
The five-power constitution (wu-ch'üan hsien-fa) is a legacy of Sun Yat-sen, and is one of the cardinal dogmas of the San Min Chu I. Distinctively, two new powers are added to the familiar three: namely, the examinative and the control powers. Westerners might question the importance of segregating the impeaching, auditing and critical powers, unifying them into a new agency of government, along with a glorified, independent civil service system. Yet the five-fold division is to China a key point of governmental development.
The five-power system is based on the notions Sun Yat-sen had of democracy. He anticipated by a generation the need of strengthening democratic machinery to compete with Caesarian techniques. Merely to have qualified the suffrage, or to have narrowed the limits of popular action, would not have sufficed, for it was authentic democracy—government both representative and popular—which he desired, not an empty shell of nominal republicanism. In an effort to solve this dilemma, he employed the concepts ch'üan and nêng,[1] which may be translated "power" and "capacity," although the rendering would necessarily vary in accordance with the connotations to be encompassed.[2] He felt that it was a major discovery to apply in modern politics a distinction between the power which the people should have over government and the capability they had of operating the machine of state. Abandoning the state to the vagaries of public opinion, allowing the citizens free access to the powerful, complex controls of modern governance, or assuming that anyone and everyone had an expert's qualifications on all political subjects—this would, in Sun Yat-sen's opinion, wreck the government. Nevertheless, the people had to reserve a final power over policies and personnel of government, although they are themselves unqualified to operate the state mechanism. Hence the people were to exercise the four powers over the government: initiative, referendum, election, and recall. Compensatingly, the government was to possess the five rights over the people, based on the new separation of powers. To Sun, as a Chinese, the state was not the hand of the people; it was a separate institution above other institutions, democratic only in allowing access to itself and in justifying its authority by the ultimate sanction of popular vote. The new government could not be kept clean, prompt, and high-minded by the freak, casual operation of popular censure, nor staffed by whomever a mass fancy threw into office. It was, instead, to be a traditionally Chinese self-perpetuating bureaucracy, differing from the past only in being controlled and revised by popular instead of imperial will.
Accordingly, the ideal toward which the Chungking government strives may be epitomized as perfect bureaucracy subject to complete popular control. The two powers new to the West—examination and control—are to replace public opinion at levels of obscurity, technicality, and persistence where outside criticism could not reach; the plan of Sun Yat-sen provides for as much use of power through voting as is found in any Western state. This attempted solution strikes near the core problems of any modern government, wherever it may operate and whatever its conditions.
The five-power constitution posits a government of educated, expert men, in which qualifying examinations will precede election for administrative posts, and in which the examination and control yüan will—professionally, officially—replace the haphazard play of sentiment, anger, fancy, envy upon which Western peoples count to keep their democracy healthy and intact. The United States Government is the most complex and important institution in the United States, possessing inquisitorial powers wider and deeper than those of any private person or institution. Yet the Americans have no unceasing, professional, expert investigation of their government by their government, nor does a merit system extend to offices where it might have the drastic effect of thwarting operation of public opinion locally or temporarily debased.
This function, specializing power to strengthen it, explains the war-time survival of the five-power system as a fundamental theory of state. The Chinese have suffered from weak government for decades. Absence of dictatorship was largely owing to an inability to designate a dictator. The five-power system was preceded by a Nationalist government which employed the soviet form of organization—the one instance outside the Soviet Union of such application.[3] This had been set up for rapid, decisive action; thirteen years' preliminary application of the five-power system has shown this to be no less swift and effectual. Even the Communist leaders in China today are reconciled to the retention of the five-power system, although they would certainly like to modify its present organization.[4]