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] [Footnote 3: See Holcombe, Arthur N., _The Chinese Revolution_, Cambridge (Massachusetts), 1930, passim, for the outstanding elaboration of this curious experiment, and for a lucid delineation of the genesis of the National Government.] [Footnote 4: Statement to the author by Col. Ch'in Po-k'u, interview cited, p. 38, n. 20, above.]