An Argument Made to Justify a Conquest

The Zhou had a problem after they defeated the Shang. The Shang kings had claimed a unique relationship with their own high god and with their royal ancestors, and had run an enormous divination apparatus on that basis. A rival house that overthrew them needed an account of why the gods had permitted it. The answer, worked out in the early Zhou documents and traditionally credited to the Duke of Zhou, was the Mandate of Heaven: Heaven grants the right to rule to a house that governs well and withdraws it from a house that does not, and the transfer is not arbitrary but earned. That claim was designed to legitimate one conquest and it did something much larger. It made the ruling house permanently accountable to a standard outside itself, and it supplied every subsequent Chinese rebellion with a ready made justification, since a dynasty that could be shown to have failed had by definition already lost the mandate.

The Cambridge History of Ancient China sets out how the surviving early Zhou speeches make the argument. It is worth noting what the doctrine does not say. It offers no promise to any individual, no afterlife and no personal relationship with Heaven; it is a theory about the legitimacy of government, and it stayed one for three thousand years.