Sun Yat-sen did not comment on the frequency with which he expected these powers to be exercised, nor has the political development of democratic China gone far enough to afford any test of experience; it is consequently impossible to state whether these powers were to be, or shall be, exercised constantly as a matter of course, or whether they shall be employed by the people only as [pg 221] courses for emergency action, when the government arouses their displeasure. The latter seems the more probable, in view of the background of Chinese tradition, and the strong propensities of the Chinese to avoid getting involved in anything which does not concern them immediately and personally. This probability is made the more plausible by the self-corrective devices in the governmental system, which may seem to imply that an extensive use of the popular corrective power was not contemplated by Sun Yat-sen.
Sun Yat-sen said:
Now we separate power from capacity and we say that the people are the engineers and the government is the machine. On the one hand, we want the machinery of the government to be all-powerful, able to do anything, and on the other hand we want the engineer, the people, to have great power so as to be able to control that all-powerful machine.
But what must be the mutual rights of the people and of the government in order that they might balance? We have just explained that. On the people's side there should be the four rights of election, recall, initiative, and referendum. On the government's side there must be five powers.... If the four governing powers of the people control the five administrative powers of the government, then we shall have a perfect political-democratic machine....[277]
The Five Rights.
Sun Yat-sen implemented his theory of democracy by assigning Four Powers to the people and Five Rights to the government. This latter doctrine is one of the most disputed points in his proposal. Some writers see in it nothing more than a crass conjunction of the theory of Montesquieu and the practices of the Chinese Imperial system.[278] His followers are disposed to regard the doctrine [pg 222] of the Five Rights as the product of intrepid imagination, which succeeded in reconciling the traditional scheme of Chinese things with the requirements of modern self-government.
Sun made the point that both Chinese and Western governments had in the past had tripartite governments. He illustrated this by a diagram:[279]
Constitution of China
The Examining Power (Kao Shih ch'üan)