a five-power constitution, ‘a new constitutionalism' for China,[150] and a ‘revolu­tionary constitution' in the Ackermanian sense[151] in its way of constitutionalising the founding father Sun Yat-sen's personal charisma and constitutional theo­ries.

Revolutionary, nationalistic, and charismatic at the same time, the 1946 Constitution was a landmark not only in terms of Chinese constitutional history, but also for constitution-making on a global scale to the degree that it would impact significantly more than a fifth of the world's population.

With the above-mentioned three considerations, this chapter delves into the causes, processes, substances, and enforcing mechanisms of the 1946 Constitution of the Republic of China from a wider historical perspective. Section one navigates readers through China's 1840 dilemma, which contextualises China's constitution­making against a broader political-economic backdrop of state-failure spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Section II under­scores the long constitution-making process, at the end of which Sun Yat-sen's five-power constitution was textualised despite significant modifications made during the process. Both processes of constitutional designing and constitution­making of the 1946 Constitution, as this section suggests, were preordained by rounds of the earlier efforts, which assured that the processes in 1946 were both smooth and successful. Section III narrows the focus on the three major constitutional texts in the 1930s and 1940s. The end-product of the two decades' constitution-making was a mixture of a five-power constitutional framework fleshed out with rich details generated from post-WWII and ongoing civil-war real politics. Section IV attributes the success of the constitutional enforcement, irrespective of the unique situation in which the Constitution was functioning, to the institutionalisation of the constitutional court (the Council of Grand Justices), which guarded the Constitution through the extreme political tensions related to Chiang Kai-shek's governance in Taiwan.

I.