ABSTRACT
Great changes and new periods in political life have often been associated with changes to the then-current Constitution. Similarly, the relationship between constitutional texts and one-party rule under the rubric of the “people's democratic dictatorship” has generally been not so much a site of tension as one of conditional, instrumental engagement. The notion that the public law framework of a polity is an artificial product of legislation that can be revised in pursuit of certain goals is a modern political belief. The “project” model of constitutionalism—the argument that the text and its rules are direct expressions of the popular will—is a more difficult fit for these models. The resumption of civil war ended in Nationalist defeat and the establishment of the People's Republic of China in October 1949, which was preceded by a revised iteration of the CPPCC, now under Communist Party domination as extensive as the Nationalist control had been in 1946.
