The Chinese gods are a civil service. The celestial order is arranged as a graded bureaucracy with the Jade Emperor at its head, ministries beneath him with defined portfolios, and local officials, the city gods and the earth gods, at the bottom of the hierarchy holding jurisdiction over precisely delimited territory. Petitions travel upward through channels, and offerings are made with documents that are burned to transmit them.
Because it is an administration, rank in it can change. Deities are promoted, given new titles, and occasionally demoted or stripped of recognition, and for long stretches of imperial history this was done by the state, which maintained registers of officially recognised gods and issued canonisations. The kitchen god's annual report on a household's conduct is the same logic in miniature.
The route in is therefore an appointment. Mazu was a girl on the Fujian coast; Guan Yu was a general who lost a war. Both were enrolled and repeatedly promoted, ending with titles that a living official would recognise as ranks. This is the sharpest contrast the atlas records with the Greek arrangement, where a mortal becomes divine through the merit of an extraordinary life rather than by decree.
There is no creator ruling this system. Pangu's body becomes the world as he dies, and Nuwa shapes human beings, but neither governs afterwards. The pantheon absorbed rather than excluded, taking in Buddhist figures, Daoist immortals and local gods without requiring them to agree with one another.