It is not, therefore, extraordinarily strange to find the ancient institutions of the Empire surviving by the side of the most extreme methods of popular government. The censorate and the referendum, the examination system and the recall, all could work together in the democracy planned by Sun Yat-sen. Even with the idea of popular rule adopted in the formal Western manner, Sun Yat-sen proposed to continue the idea of natural and ineradicable class differences between men. The Chinese democracy was not to be any mere imitation of the West; it was to be the fundamentally new fusion of Chinese and Western methods, and offered as the solution for the political readjustment of the Chinese society in a world no longer safe for it. The Four Powers. Sun Yat-sen divided all men into three categories: the geniuses, the followers, and the unthinking. To reconcile this theory of natural inequality with democracy, he distinguished between _ch’üan_, the right to rule as sovereign, and _nêng_, the right to administer as an official. He furthermore considered the state similar to a machine. How should the unthinking, who would possess _ch’üan_, the right to rule, be granted that right without attempting to usurp _nêng_? This was to be accomplished by two means. The Four Powers were to be given to the people, in order to assure their possession of _ch’üan_. The Five Rights were to assure that the government might be protected in its right to _nêng_, in its right to have only the most competent officials. Together the Four Powers and the Five Rights implement a scheme of government so novel that Sun Yat-sen himself believed it to be a definite contribution to political method. The learned Jesuit translator of the _San Min Chin I_ does not even term it democracy, but neo-democracy instead.(275) The Four Powers represent an almost extreme limit of popular control. Sun Yat-sen divided the four into two groups: the first two are powers of the people over the administrators—the power of election and the power of recall; the second two are powers of the people over the laws—the power of initiative and the power of referendum. Having secured the government from undue interference, Sun Yat-sen had no reluctance in giving these powers to the people. He said: “As for our China, since she had no old democratic system, she ought to be able to make very good use of this most recent and excellent invention.”(276)