The Mandate of Heaven

Just as Chinese society developed mechanisms to diminish violent acts, political ideology also conceptualised violence negatively by associating it with destruction and chaos. Any discussion of Chinese political thought must begin with an appreciation of that country's immense size.

When Chinese thinkers looked back on their long history, they saw alternating periods of order and chaos as a fundamental pattern. Accounting for this oscillation in a way that could bolster national unity became a key objective of political discourse. At the beginning of the Western Zhou dynasty (eleventh century bce), authorities devised the theory of heavenly mandate (tianming) to explain the repeated construction and col­lapse of political order.^[1031] According to this belief, a ruler did not exercise sovereignty due to force, heredity or the popular will, but because he had received the sanction of heaven. Conceptions of heaven varied considerably but usually remained conveniently vague. Although the emperor wor­shipped heaven as a god, it was not anthropomorphic. Heaven represented an abstract force that enforced the laws of both nature and ethics. Although the ruler derived his power from a remote supernatural authority rather than the human realm, heaven responds to worldly events and remains intimately linked to human activities.

According to this viewpoint, violence should be understood in relation to the mandate of heaven. If a ruler behaves unjustly, ruling by threats and force rather than virtue, he will lose the mandate and be destroyed. After the fall of a morally decayed dynasty, a period of chaos ensues, unleashing war and horrific turmoil. In the end, however, one of the military leaders will eventually obtain heaven's mandate, reunite China, and put an end to unrestrained violence.

The mandate of heaven theory informed the ideas of Sima Qian (c. 145-86 bce) and other early historians, who rejected the possibility that history consists of random contingency. By applying this ideology to their historical investigations, they depicted the workings of the past as an organised process overseen by an overarching moralistic supernatural force. This sophisticated conceptual framework became a standard model for discussing violence.

The theory provided Chinese with a way to understand large-scale vio­lence by imbricating it within a larger ideological framework that they could use to stabilise and govern their vast polity. The heavenly mandate system envisioned violence as neither random nor meaningless. Instead it functioned as both cause and effect within a dynastic cycle of rise, decay and fall. This viewpoint delegitimised violence by presenting it as an aberration in the basic fabric of the cosmos that civilisation must overcome.