Mandate of Heaven in the context of "Wu Zetian"

The history of China spans several millennia across a wide geographical area. Each region now considered part of the Chinese world has experienced periods of unity, fracture, prosperity, and strife. Chinese civilization first emerged in the Yellow River valley, which along with the Yangtze basin constitutes the geographic core of the Chinese cultural sphere. China maintains a rich diversity of ethnic and linguistic people groups. The traditional lens for viewing Chinese history is the dynastic cycle: imperial dynasties rise and fall, and are ascribed certain achievements. This lens also tends to assume Chinese civilization can be traced as an unbroken thread many thousands of years into the past, making it one of the cradles of civilization. At various times, states representative of a dominant Chinese culture have directly controlled areas stretching as far west as the Tian Shan, the Tarim Basin, and the Himalayas, as far north as the Sayan Mountains, and as far south as the delta of the Red River.

The Neolithic period saw increasingly complex polities begin to emerge along the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. The Erlitou culture in the central plains of China is sometimes identified with the Xia dynasty (3rd millennium BC) of traditional Chinese historiography. The earliest surviving written Chinese dates to roughly 1250 BC, consisting of divinations inscribed on oracle bones. Chinese bronze inscriptions, ritual texts dedicated to ancestors, form another large corpus of early Chinese writing. The earliest strata of received literature in Chinese include poetry, divination, and records of official speeches. China is believed to be one of a very few loci of independent invention of writing, and the earliest surviving records display an already-mature written language. The culture remembered by the earliest extant literature is that of the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046 – 256 BC), China's Axial Age, during which the Mandate of Heaven was introduced, and foundations laid for philosophies such as Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism, and Wuxing.

In political science, legitimacy is a concept concerning the right of an authority, usually a governing law or a regime, to rule the actions of a society. In political systems where this is not the case, unpopular regimes survive because they are considered legitimate by a small, influential elite. In Chinese political philosophy, since the historical period of the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BC), the political legitimacy of a ruler and government was derived from the Mandate of Heaven, and unjust rulers who lost said mandate therefore lost the right to rule the people.

In moral philosophy, the term legitimacy is often positively interpreted as the normative status conferred by a governed people upon their governors' institutions, offices, and actions, based upon the belief that their government's actions are appropriate uses of power by a legally constituted government.

The Xia dynasty (/ʃiɑː/; Chinese: 夏朝, romanized: Xià cháo) is the first dynasty in traditional Chinese historiography. According to tradition, it was established by the likely legendary figure Yu the Great, after Shun, the last of the Five Emperors, gave the throne to him. In traditional historiography, the Xia dynasty was succeeded by the Shang dynasty.

There are no contemporaneous records of the Xia, and they are not mentioned in the oldest Chinese texts, the earliest oracle bone inscriptions dating from the Late Shang period (13th century BC). The earliest mentions occur in the oldest chapters of the Book of Documents, which report speeches from the early Western Zhou period and are accepted by most scholars as dating from that time. The speeches justify the Zhou conquest of the Shang as the passing of the Mandate of Heaven and liken it to the succession of the Xia by the Shang. That political philosophy was promoted by the Confucian school in the Eastern Zhou period. The succession of dynasties was incorporated into the Bamboo Annals and Shiji and became the official position of imperial historiography and ideology. Some scholars consider the Xia dynasty legendary or at least unsubstantiated. Others identify it with the archaeological Erlitou culture (c. 1900–1700 BC), although there is no firm evidence, such as surviving written records, to support such a linkage.

Throughout Chinese history, "Emperor" (Chinese: 皇帝; pinyin: Huángdì) was the superlative title held by the monarchs of imperial China's various dynasties. In traditional Chinese political theory, the emperor was the "Son of Heaven", an autocrat with the divine mandate to rule all under Heaven. Emperors were worshiped posthumously under a secular imperial cult. The lineage of emperors descended from a paternal family line constituted a dynasty, and succession in most cases theoretically followed agnatic primogeniture. The emperor of China was an absolute monarch, though in the late Qing reforms plans were made to move the emperor to a constitutional monarch.

During the Han dynasty, Confucianism gained sanction as the official political theory. The absolute authority of the emperor came with a variety of governing duties and moral obligations; failure to uphold these was thought to remove the dynasty's Mandate of Heaven and to justify its overthrow. In practice, emperors sometimes avoided the strict rules of succession and dynasties' purported "failures" were detailed in official histories written by their successful replacements or even later dynasties. The power of the emperor was also limited by the imperial bureaucracy, which was staffed by scholar-officials, and eunuchs during some dynasties. An emperor was also constrained by filial obligations to his ancestors' policies and dynastic traditions, such as those first detailed in the Ming-era Huang-Ming Zuxun (Ancestral Instructions).

In traditional Confucian philosophy, li is an ethical concept broadly translatable as 'rite'. According to Wing-tsit Chan, li originally referred to religious sacrifices, but has come to mean 'ritual' in a broad sense, with possible translations including 'ceremony', 'ritual', 'decorum', 'propriety', and 'good form'. Hu Shih notes that li has "even been equated with natural law" by some western scholars. In Chinese cosmology, li refers to rites through which human agency participates in the larger order of the universe. One of the most common definitions of 'rite' is a performance transforming the invisible into the visible: through the performance of rites at appropriate occasions, humans make the underlying order visible. Correct ritual practice focuses and orders the social world in correspondence with the terrestrial and celestial worlds, keeping all three in harmony.

Throughout the Sinosphere, li was thought of as the abstract force that made government possible—along with the Mandate of Heaven it metaphysically combined with—and it ensured "worldly authority" would bestow itself onto competent rulers. The effect of ritual has been described as "centering", and was among the duties of the emperor, who was called the 'Son of Heaven'. However, rites were performed by all those involved in the affairs of state. Rites also involve ancestral and life-cycle dimensions. Daoists who conducted the rites of local gods as a centering of the forces of exemplary history, of liturgical service, of the correct conduct of human relations, and of the arts of divination such as the earliest of all Chinese classics—the I Ching—joining textual learning to bodily practices for harmonization of exogenous and endogenous origins of energy qi for a longer healthier life.