terranMarine
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I must protest for i am not inclined to acquiesce to your conjecture. If I may, The Mandate of Heaven was a political-social philosophy that served as the basic Chinese explanation for the success and failure of monarchs and states down to the end of the empire in 1912 CE. Whenever a dynasty fell, the reason invariably offered by China's sages was that it had lost the moral right to rule which is given by Heaven alone. In this context heaven did not mean a personal god but a cosmic all-pervading power.The Mandate of Heaven was integrated with and reinforced by the teachings of Confucianism. This social and political philosophy was derived from the writings of Chinese scholar Kong Fuzi. The cyclic disposition of dynastic rise and fall was referred to as the processes in which the Mandate of Heaven passed from one fallen dynasty to the other. Since the Qing Dynasty was the last true Imperial Chinese Dynasty, then its last ruler, Pu Yi was the last Emperor to hold the Mandate of Heaven.
After his abdication, were the governments of Sun Yat Sen, Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai Shek) and of course the Bolshevik-inspired communist, Mao Zhedong, who was antithetic towards conservative culture and the old religio-philosphico context-- took the reigns of power.
This is why I must stress and rightly so, that the Mandate of Heaven dissipated when China transformed from an Autocratic Monarchy into republican, to communist forms of government.
敬具,
ケンジ
The Mandate of Heaven is not about the cyclic process of passing down the Mandate to the next ruler of a new Dynasty.
Each Emperor would pass on the throne to one of his sons as the next ruler, so he would hold the Mandate of Heaven. If the new ruler would be overthrown by one of his relatives (for example uncle or brother), the Dynasty would remain the same but the Mandate of Heaven has switched to him. It's like the legitimacy has passed down to the new ruler.