The Mandate of Heaven

Chinese students protesting the repressive Covid policies.Credit...Jerome Favre/EPA, via Shutterstock

The Mandate of Heaven, the guide to how to rule in China, centers on wisdom, vision and care. If a ruler does not abide by these essentials, chaos and removal of said ruler will follow. 

To whit

Intrinsic to the concept of the Mandate of Heaven was the right of rebellion against an unjust ruler. 

Seem Xi doesn't get it as he's losing his people as we speak.

Last weekend, in several cities across the country, from cosmopolitan Shanghai to far-western Xinjiang, ordinary people took to the streets to denounce the government’s stifling Covid-19 suppression policy and in some cases call for democracy and freedom of speech.

The sudden release of nearly three years of pent-up frustration over the excessive Covid measures — which have disrupted lives, separated families and crippled the economy — is the largest anti-government outburst since the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations centered on Tiananmen Square. Again, the odds are against the protesters. The Chinese Communist Party, which completely controls the country, has moved quickly to suppress it.

But the Chinese people have reached a tipping point. The brutal crackdown in 1989 left China’s people depoliticized and intimidated into the social contract that has governed life for three decades: Leave politics to the party in return for some economic freedom. A new generation, pushed to the brink by the government’s zero-Covid obsession, has discovered its voice.

Seems China, like Iran, wants a different future. One can only hope.

A brief flow chart depicting the flow of auctoritas in the transfer of the 

Mandate of Heaven at the transition of dynastic cycles.