Had the Kuomintang leaders been obtuse and made the Council something less than a genuine sounding board for public opinion, or had they picked unrepresentative members of the other groups, the whole experiment would have failed. In practice, the compromise worked and gave China a focus for the national concentration of will. The Council did not elect its own Speaker (_I-chang_) and Deputy-Speaker (_Fu I-chang_); these were elected for it by the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang. Down to 1940, the Council elected a Resident Committee of fifteen to twenty-five members from its own membership; under a recent reorganization, this and the Speaker and Vice-Speaker are to be replaced by a Presidium, to be elected by but not necessarily from among the Council, to consist of five members and to hold the authority of designating presiding officers. This would amount to a further step in the independence of the Council. In both cases, the Secretariat (_Mi-shu-ch'u_) of the Council is to be under a Secretary-General (_Mi-shu-chang_) and Deputy Secretary-General (_Fu Mi-shu-chang_) and to include services of correspondence, general affairs, Council affairs, and police.[5] [Footnote 5: _Tang Chêng Chien Chih T'u-piao_, cited, chart of the _Kuo-min Ts'an-chêng Hui_.] With respect to competence, the Council is possessed of three powers: (1) the right to deliberate on all important measures, whether of domestic or foreign policy, before these are enacted into law by the Central Government (but not, however, the right of making such law); (2) the right to submit proposals to the government (but since the Supreme National Defense Council is the highest government-directing agency in China, its concurrence is patently necessary); (3) the right to demand and hear reports from the _Yüan_ and the Ministries, and to interpellate the officers of state. The distinguished Chinese constitutional scholar, Wang Shih-chieh, Secretary-General of the People's Political Council (Generalissimo Chiang himself being the Speaker) writes of its functions: From the foregoing description, the peculiarities of the People's Political Council may be clearly seen. It is not an advisory body of the Government in the ordinary conception of the term, because the Government is bound, except in emergency cases, to submit to it for consideration all important measures before they are carried out. The Council possesses not only the power to advise, but also the right to be consulted. Nor is it a legislative organ, as all its resolutions merely embody broad principles of legislation or administration, i.e., lines of policy which, even after being assented to by the Supreme National Defense Council, will still have to go through the ordinary legislative or ordinance-making process in order to become laws or administrative ordinances.