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.