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. [Footnote 1: See Sun Yat-sen, _San Min Chu I_, Shanghai, 1927, henceforth cited as "Price translation," p. 296 _ff._; or d'Elia, Paschal M., S. J., _The Triple Demism of Sun Yat-sen_, Wuchang, 1931, p. 348 _ff._] [Footnote 2: An attempt to correlate Sun's democratic theory with Western concepts is made in the present author's _Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen_, cited, p. 107-9. The notion is clearly put in _L'Esprit des Lois_, Book 11, ch. 2.]