According to the book of documents, what did a ruler have to do to retain the mandate of heaven?

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Posted on May 28, 2020

The story goes that in early January, 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang, the future emperor of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), had eliminated his contending rivals, but when his followers urged him to take the throne, he hesitated. He said that he would not make such a decision on his own and that he would consult the high heavens for guidance. So he set up an alter to worship the supreme cosmic deity and prayed that if the heavens approved the new ruling house, January 23rd would be a bright day and he would mark it as the day of enthronement. On the scheduled day, the sky miraculously cleared up after several consecutive days of snow and interpreting this as an auspicious sign, Zhu claimed he attained the Mandate of Heaven (Tianming) and announced the founding of the Ming Dynasty. In an effort to rebuild the Chinese empire, Zhu initiated a series of social programs and legal documents that came to be known as the ‘Ming Constitution’, which covered all aspects of empire, including governmental institutions, cultural policies, and social customs. ‘The Great Ming Code’ set forth a value system and legal culture that not only had a profound impact on the subsequent Manchu-Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), but also affected the ruling establishments of neighboring countries, such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam (Jiang, 2011).

Both the Ming Constitution and the Ming Code worked to establish emperor Zhu as the ‘Son of Heaven’, where he was believed to act as a mediator between the spiritual-heaven realm and the earthly human realm with the purpose of establishing a harmonious cosmic-social order that would bring peace and prosperity to his subjects (Goldstein, 2017). Importantly, if the rulers would violate the cosmic order by abusing their power and acting immorally, heaven would send down a warning by bringing disaster on society and revoking the Mandate to rule. Thus, it was normal for dynasties to rise and fall according to a regular pattern of popular protest, rebellion and a new mandate to rule, which was often given by various divine omens. The system allowed political challengers, whether peasants or foreign invaders, to make bids for the kingship by rebellion and created checks and balances so if the imperial family grew increasingly corrupt, the dynasty would lose its Mandate. Although the Mandate was on some level an important tool used by the ruling elite to justify state power, it was not only used as a means of behavioral control. The Mandate attempted to embody an ideal cosmic order based on the Heavenly principle (tianli, the ultimate origin of the universe) and human sentiment (renqing, human compassion based on the Heavenly principle).

In key Confucian texts, it is written that the ruler in the Mandate of Heaven “is a boat and the people are water. Water can carry the boat and overturn it, too” (Xunzi, “Wangba” chapter), and “The people are the most crucial and important, the next is the state, and the least is the king” (Mencius, “Jinxinxia” chapter). These exerts highlight that there is some humility to the emperor’s authority. The emperor does not have a ‘right’ to rule, but a duty to fulfill according to heavenly destiny. In that case, the heavenly appointed role holds the ruler accountable to the people for if his duties are not performed well, then he risks losing the Mandate to rule (Zhao, 2009). To be a well-performing emperor, a Chinese ruler needs to receive many years of intensive education in Confucian classics, history, calligraphy, and statecraft from Confucian officials at an early age. This required training is meant to ensure that China’s politico-legal cosmology was modelled on a higher moral order that could create structure and peace in times of high instability brought about by, for example, foreign ‘barbarians’, greedy imperialists, natural disasters, epidemics or internal corruption. In fact, according to the Mandate, the emperor was to assume responsibility for any natural disasters and the common people viewed disasters and famines as a sign of unfit rule and possible dynastic change. The emperor’s performance legitimacy and duty to rule for his people inspired thousands of peasant (and sometimes foreign-led) rebellions throughout China’s history, and the country’s rebels and revolutionaries were often romanticized and glorified in literature.

The Mandate’s mythology was still an influential force in the 20th century. For instance, the father of the Chinese Revolution, Sun Yat-sen, who was a convert in Christianity and trained in Western medicine, visited the Ming tombs and proclaimed the downfall of the Manchus upon the founding of the 1912 Republic. The people-led revolution also inspired Mao Zedong’s doctrine of “People’s War”, which played an important role in the Communist victory in 1949. As Perry (2001) states, “Like Mencius’s Mandate of Heaven, Mao’s Mass Line insisted on the reciprocal linkage between leader and led in staking a claim to higher political morality” (p. x). Thus, whereas Stalin’s communist revolution looked to the secret police to enforce a top-down order, Mao made it clear that the masses were to engage in government-sponsored class struggle campaigns so that revolution could be achieved from below. While mass campaigns were thought to be over in the Deng Xiaoping era, popular protests have continued in the post-Mao era. From the Democracy Wall Movement (1978-79), the 1985 anti-Japanese demonstrations, the 1989 student uprisings to the 2019 anti-government protests in Hong Kong, protestors have remained active and unafraid of violent reprisal. With market-oriented reform widening the gap between rich and poor, and with the Chinese Communist Party increasingly centralizing state power, dissent has also spread on the Chinese internet. In 2016, a letter calling for President Xi Jinping’s resignation was signed by loyal members of the Communist Party and leaked on various websites before being pulled down by authorities (Rauhala & Xu, 2016). 20 people were detained over the incident (Sudworth, 2016). The anti-Xi Jinping movement also created the online nickname for the President, Da si bi (大撒币), which literally means to “giving big money”, but the sound of the three Chinese words can also sound like saying “stupid”. The nickname refers to how President Xi gives big money in exchange for global influence, but he is stupid for doing so because he is only representing the interests of the party and not the people (Zhou, 2019).

Challenging the Mandate was never easy. The necessity for political protest and revolution as a feature of China’s politico-legal cosmology and history was well suited to its 20th century communist takeover. Although stripped of its religious-cosmological aspects, Marxism put forward the necessity of revolution to abolish the bourgeois state. As Engels notes, “[force] is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one, that it is the instrument with which social movement forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilized political forms” (cited in Lenin, 1918). In other words, it is revolution and human struggle that moves societies from one historical stage to the next and without properly serving the people by allowing for social inequality and economic hardship to become widespread, it is a given that rulers risk losing their ‘mandate’. In the Analects, Confucius also puts forward a theory on how good ruler conduct makes revolution unnecessary. He states that it is important to “Advance the upright and set aside the crooked, then the people will submit. Advance the crooked and set aside the upright, then the people will not submit” (2:14). Although revolution is seemingly necessary for just political change, Confucian texts do not outline what makes revolts successful. For Karl Marx, the one class capable of leading countries to political freedom was the proletariat since it is more realistic to expect a radical revolution to get rid of oppressive economic and political structures like capitalism than to expect the bourgeoisie to lead the way through political democracy (Fiddick, 1978). According to Tiruneh (2014), by examining the literature, two types of revolutions can be identified: spontaneous and planned. Without any significant organized effort, spontaneous revolutions occur when many factions of a society suddenly and without prior planning take part in protests and quickly seek to overthrow the current political-economic system. The purpose of spontaneous revolutionary action is that officials are unable to predict the onset of a popular uprising spreading rapidly across a country like that of the 1911 Chinese Revolution and 1917 Russian Revolution. Planned revolutions, on the other hand, are more guerilla-led or deliberately organized by revolutionaries. Revolutionary efforts can be anticipated and the fight for political-economic freedom will take a longer and harder road. What makes either revolution successful is strong leadership, where far-sighted individuals are able to unite normally opposed groups of people into large-scale political movements. As well as revolutionary ideology, popular support, access to resources and organizational strength, success in revolutionary efforts usually comes down to whether the military is either acquiescent or supportive of or otherwise defeated by popular uprisings and revolutionary fighters (Perry, 2001; Tiruneh, 2014).

In China’s current political situation, the government has tried to avoid any popular uprising or revolutionary efforts by replacing the radical, revolutionary communism as the ideological foundation of the political system to traditional, conservative Confucianism. For instance, in the 4th Plenary Session of the 16th Congress of the CCP Central Committee held in September 2004, former President Hu Jintao called for the creation of a “harmonious society” and new development policies were directed towards the underprivileged Chinese population (Jin & Nahm, 2019). To avoid a peasant rebellion, the government abolished all agricultural taxes, increased the provision of subsidies for farming, and removed the one-child policy, while also strengthening the Letters and Petitions Bureaus in the State Council and People’s Congress to avoid riots and protests. The government also launched its Western China development project that aimed to manage the widening regional inequalities. However, the Chinese state cannot sustain its role based only on performance legitimacy alone because it runs the risk of promising to deliver too much welfare to too many people. Without ideological and legal-electoral legitimacy, the Chinese government has had to resort to acting paternalistically and coercively, which has resulted in the high cost of surveillance technologies and locally spread and difficult to track resistance. Because there is limited opportunities for compromise between citizens and the state who are diametrically opposed in their understanding of state legitimacy, revolution or at least local (or even digital) rebellion seems inevitable.