Mandate of Heaven
The Mandate of Heaven is a Chinese political doctrine that was used in Ancient China and Imperial China to legitimize the rule of the king or emperor of China. According to this doctrine, Heaven bestows its mandate on a virtuous ruler, called the Son of Heaven, who is the supreme universal monarch that will rule the world. If a ruler was overthrown, this was interpreted as an indication that the ruler and his dynasty were unworthy and had lost the Mandate. It was also a common belief that natural disasters such as famine and flood were divine retributions bearing signs of Heaven's displeasure with the ruler, so there would often be revolts following major disasters as the people saw these calamities as signs that the Mandate of Heaven had been withdrawn.
The Mandate of Heaven does not require a legitimate ruler to be of noble birth. Chinese dynasties such as the Han and Ming were founded by men of common origins, but they were seen as having succeeded because they had gained the Mandate of Heaven. Retaining the mandate is contingent on the just and able performance of the rulers and their heirs.
Corollary to the concept of the Mandate of Heaven was the right of rebellion against an unjust ruler. The Mandate of Heaven was often invoked by philosophers and scholars in China as a way to curtail the abuse of power by the ruler, in a system that had few other checks. Chinese historians interpreted a successful revolt as evidence that Heaven had withdrawn its mandate from the ruler. Throughout Chinese history, times of poverty and natural disasters were often taken as signs that heaven considered the incumbent ruler unjust and thus in need of replacement. The classical statement of the legitimacy of rebellion against an unjust ruler, found in the Mencius, was often edited out of that text.
The concept of the Mandate of Heaven also extends to the ruler's family having divine rights and was first used to support the rule of the kings of the Zhou dynasty to legitimize their overthrow of the earlier Shang dynasty. It was used throughout the history of China to legitimize the successful overthrow and installation of new dynasties, including by non-Han dynasties such as the Qing dynasty. The Mandate of Heaven has been called the Zhou dynasty's most important contribution to Chinese political thought, but it coexisted and interfaced with other theories of sovereign legitimacy, including abdication to the worthy and five phases theory.
History
Transition between the Shang and the Zhou
The prosperous Shang dynasty saw its rule filled with multiple outstanding accomplishments. Notably, the dynasty lasted for a considerable time during which 31 kings ruled over an extended period of 17 generations. The rule of the Shang kings has been described as hegemonic. Royal authority flowed from the person of the king, enforced by his military. Neighbouring clans were allied through marriage and adopted into the Shang ancestral temple.A poem about the last years of the Shang dynasty reads "Heaven sends down death and disorder; famine comes repeatedly." Paleoclimatic data show a long-term period of cooling in the northern hemisphere, which reached its maximum right around the fall of the Shang.
In 1059 BCE, two unusual celestial phenomena took place: in May, the densest clustering in five hundred years' time of the five planets visible to the naked eye could be seen in the constellation of Cancer, and a few seasons later Halley's Comet appeared. One or more of these was interpreted by the powerful Lord of Zhou as a visible sign indicating supernatural approval. Early records, such as the inscription on the Da Yu ding, employ language more descriptive than theoretical: "the great command in the sky".
Although both the Shang and Zhou claimed divine ancestry, the Zhou were the first to use the concept of the Mandate of Heaven to explain their right to assume rule and presumed that the only way to hold the mandate was to rule well in the eyes of Heaven. They also stated that the Shang came into power because the Xia had lost their mandate, which had then been bestowed upon the Shang, leading to the fall of the Xia and the rise of the Shang. The Xia gave precedent and legitimacy to the Zhou's own rebellion. No Western Zhou bronze inscriptions mention the Xia, or any other dynasty preceding the Shang. The Zhou believed that the Shang ruling house had become morally corrupt and that the Shang leaders' loss of virtue entitled their own house to take over. The overthrow of the Shang Dynasty, they said, was in accordance with the mandate given by Heaven. Even at the time of the inauguration ritual of third-generation King Kang of Zhou, the royal command read out to the new king explicitly stated the belief that Heaven had changed its mandate.
In the political theory of the Zhou, legitimate authority flowed directly from Heaven to their founding dynast, King Wen. Although he did not live to see the Zhou conquest of Shang, his legitimacy passed to his heirs. Early on in the dynasty, there was some debate as to whether Heaven's mandate had fallen to the senior sons of King Wen's line, or to the house of Zhou as a group, as exemplified by an exchange surviving in the classic Book of Documents.
Eastern Zhou
The Zhou dynasty was marked by early success and expansion until the death on campaign of King Kang's successor, King Zhao of Zhou. During the ensuing centuries, central authority waned overall, driven by socioeconomic pressures. This culminated in a succession crisis which saw the aristocracy split between two competing candidates for a number of years. When the crisis resolved, the royal house retained only a tiny amount of land and no real military power. This marked the beginning of the Eastern Zhou. During the decline of the royal house, although real power was wrested from their grasp, their divine legitimacy was not brought into question, and even with the king reduced to something of a figurehead, his prestige remained supreme as Heaven's eldest son.However, there is epigraphic evidence that, in private, the rulers of the state of Qin held that their ancestors had received Heaven's mandate. As early as the 600s BCE, multiple inscriptions attest to this idea. It is unclear whether the Qin rulers meant they believed they had celestial approval to replace the Zhou kings, whether they believed themselves the appointed heirs of the Zhou should the royal line come to an end, or whether their receipt of Heaven's mandate was construed as issuing through the Zhou king to give them legitimate authority over their own lands.
Qin and Han dynasties
When the Zhou dynasty did come to an end, Qin absorbed the remainder of their lands, as well as those of all their competitors. The Mandate of Heaven did not play a direct part in their public relations, going unmentioned in all surviving material. The Qin dynasty was not long-lived: after the death of first emperor Qin Shihuang, widespread revolts by prisoners, peasants, unhappy soldiers, ambitious minor officials, and remnants of the recently defeated aristocracy rapidly ensured the downfall of the central government. The ensuing Chu–Han contention ended with the success of Liu Bang and establishment of the Han dynasty.Surviving historical documents from the Han dynasty paint the preceding Qin in a deeply unfavourable light, emphasising tyrannical policies, the incompetence of the second emperor, and giving an account of illegitimate birth for the first emperor. In this portrayal, it is clear the Qin had lost the Mandate, if they had ever possessed it to begin with. It was an uncomfortable fact that Han founder Liu Bang rose to power from a background outside the aristocracy, and achieved victory through military accomplishments. To accommodate this, Liu Bang was ascribed a magical birth, and later a divine ancestry.
When Wang Mang took power at the end of the western Han, he used the acceptance of the theory of Heaven's Mandate to his advantage. Auspicious unusual events were said to portend Heaven's choosing a new heir, so Wang fabricated omens indicating that Heaven had changed its mandate, and that it had chosen him.
Following the restoration of the Han house to power, the Mandate of Heaven stood on uncertain grounds. Some theorists decoupled judgements of virtue from the mandate, seeing it primarily as inherited through ancestry, while others abandoned the concept altogether in favour of five phases theories.
Era of disunity
The final Han emperor abdicated to the powerful minister in and in this transfer of power the idea of Heaven's mandate played a large role. The court prognosticator Xu Zhi enumerated in a lengthy memorandum the signs he had located in divinatory and historical texts showing that Cao Pi's Wei should succeed the Han. A sequence of written statements by various officials followed, culminating in Emperor Xian of Han's formal announcement of abdication and Cao Pi's accession. The announcement of abdication explicitly mentioned that the mandate of Heaven was not permanent, and no one argued that the virtue of the house of Han had not been in decline for some time. In the eyes of these authors, Heaven's mandate followed virtue. While the idea that Cao Wei was Heaven's legitimate successor predominated for several centuries, the alternate theory that Heaven's mandate instead fell to the rival state of Shu Han was first articulated by Xi Zuochi in the 300s, and was universally accepted by the much later Song dynasty.The last Wei emperor abdicated in turn to the Western Jin. This dynasty soon lost control of northern China to non-Han ethnic groups, and in the literature of the southern dynasties that followed there began to appear an object called the State-Transmitting Seal. This magical talisman was the physical manifestation of Heaven's mandate, tied up in the fortunes of ruling families, allowing the exiled southern aristocracy to retain their sense of cultural superiority and maintain the validity of Heaven's mandate in the face of counterfactual political reality.