In the first decade of the twentieth century, some of the world’s largest and most populous polities – such as Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Persia,– were undergoing comparable constitutional transformations alongside China. Chinese thinkers and officials engaged with these shared experiences, sometimes directly, and often through European intermediaries. Chinese political and intellectual actors did not merely receive and adapt foreign models; rather, they actively formulated constitutional ideas by drawing on their own traditions of political thought, on Japanese and Western models, and on their broader observations of the world in which they lived.