In the spring of summer of 1954, Chinese gathered in lecture halls, classrooms, factory workshops and other venues to talk about the revolution. This was not, to be sure, the intention of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which wanted to use the constitution to consolidate its power and legitimacy. However, when the party asked people to raise questions about, and suggest revisions to, the draft Constitution, it allowed them to raise critical issues about the nature of the revolutionary process and China’s future. People spoke in very frank language about social class, the distribution of political power, political and social rights, military service, and state symbols such as the national flag. To date, this national constitutional discussion—a sort of prelude to Hundred Flowers as well as constitutional controversies today—has been virtually ignored in scholarship on the early PRC. Drawing upon recent archival research in the PRC and Hong Kong, Prof. Diamant will focus on several common “misunderstandings” of the constitution as a way to examine how experiences under the Guomindang and the early PRC shaped the way people understood the constitution. What did people think when they heard the words “xian fa”? How did people react to the idea that they had “freedom of religious faith”? What did “rights” mean in the context of a regime that only recently had engaged in widespread state terror?