A couple of perceptive comments to my post on the Rui’an affair have raised the question of political legitimacy, especially as expressed through the notion of the "Mandate of Heaven."   

     Alexus McLeod, who blogs at Unpolished Jade, wonders: "Perhaps increasing anger and rising number of discontents in these
contexts shows that the governments are losing the "tian ming"–and a
government which doesn’t have the support of its people cannot last as
is for long."  And Casey Kochmer, who writes A Personal Tao, asks: "do you think the government will be smart enough to reform slightly in
a few years, or take a hard line and in the long term crumble?"

   So, let’s talk about the Mandate of Heaven, how you get it and how you lose it.  As is the case with most political questions, Mencius is a good place to start.

   A Mencian view of the Mandate of Heaven would go something like this (drawn from various passages): The Mandate cannot be transferred from one person to another; it is a function of fate and destiny and Tao.  In other words, the legitimacy of an individual ruler cannot be wholly determined by man-made procedures for transferring executive authority.  These sorts of procedures are helpful, and might create a sense of orderly process (which is important in instilling a perception of legitimacy).  But such procedures do not guarantee a continuing sense of legitimacy.  In a way, then, the Mencian understanding is a form of performance legitimacy: what matters is how a leader reacts to unfolding historical circumstances.  Does he or she find the right thing to do, and do it, in various and changing  situations?

     Mencius does not give us a strict formula for correct judgment.  His is more of a situational ethics, following Confucius: "The noble-minded are all-encompassing, not stuck in doctrines.  Little people are stuck in doctrines"  (Analects 2.14).  But he does give us some general principles, or guidelines, that might be considered while working to discover the "right thing" in any particular case.  A leader should work to spread prosperity to the population at large and minimize economic inequalities.  He or she should put public interests ahead of political calculation:

Mencius said: "The people are the most precious of all things.  Next come the gods of soil and grain.  The sovereign matters least." (261).

   And, of course, Mencius wards political leaders away from using violence to bolster political power, both at home and abroad.  He is not a complete pacifist, as suggested by the notion of just war and, even, regicide, that can be found in the text.  But he generally eschews violence:

You defy Humanity if you cause the death of a single innocent person, and you defy Duty if you take what is not yours. (247).

     More could be said about general Mencian principles of good government, but let’s leave it at that and move on to the question of how these ideas might apply in modern Chinese and American circumstances.

     There is no single, unambiguous signal of when the Mandate of Heaven (which we can define as a diffuse but effective sense of political legitimacy) is lost.  As with the old saw about indecency: you know it when you see it.  Indicators like mass protest, peasant uprisings and general civil disobedience can, when they accumulate to a significant level, point to a lost Mandate.  In ancient times, natural disasters – and, I imagine, the way in which the government responded to the human suffering caused by natural disasters – also suggested a lost Mandate.  But what about now?

    In a democratic context it is easier to get some sense of a declining or lost Mandate of Heaven.  Polling gives us daily readings of public opinion, and that matters for political legitimacy.  But polling is not the only thing that may be relevant.  The general political narrative, as circulated through mass media, can tell us a good deal about the condition of a leader’s legitimacy.  For example, not only are President Bush’s poll numbers persistently low, but the more diffuse political narrative is one of declining political fortune.  Liberals, as can be expected, maintain a steady critique of Bush, but some high-profile conservatives who had supported him have now turned against him.  And the news from Iraq goes from bad to worse (even as assertions of "progress" continue to be made). 

    In other words, it seems fairly obvious that Bush is losing the Mandate of Heaven.  If his party loses one or both houses of the US Congress in November, I think we can then safely say that he has lost it definitively.

    What about China?  It is much harder to discern the ebb and flow of legitimacy because we lack public opinion polling, regular elections and a free flowing political narrative.  But there are things we can notice, such as the growing numbers of violent protests against abuses of political power, incidents like Rui’an, like Dongzhou, like Taishi, like the tens of thousands of protests across the country (PDF!).   These are precisely the kinds of desperate actions by people victimized by political power-holders that Mencius would cite as indications of a declining Mandate of Heaven.  Leaders have lost track of common prosperity and allowed economic inquality and injustice to grow.

    But, as much as I would like, personally, to conclude that the party-state has lost legitimacy and is sinking into oblivion (I am one of those who hopes for a politically freer China), I do not think this is true.  The situation is rather more complex.  When we place current events in the context of the past twenty five years of "reform and opening," we will notice that, while civil protest has certainly increased, so has economic growth and social change.  Today, especially in East coast Chinese cities, many people believe that their life’s prospects are better than they were ten years ago.  They are happy that the government is continuing economic reform, even if that means the repression of political dissent.  National pride is strong.  The immediate future looks promising.  So, people would most likely believe that what the government is doing is legitimate.

     There are problems, serious problems, of course.  If corruption and inequality and environmental degradation continue apace, the government may well face a legitimacy crisis.  The party leadership knows this very well.  They know what they have to do.  But they seem to be fearful that the policy changes which are obviously necessary might undermine the power of the party-state.  To return to Casey’s question: "do you think the government will be smart enough to reform slightly in
a few years, or take a hard line and in the long term crumble?"

     Mencius gives them an answer: "The sovereign matters least."  If President Hu is willing to cede some of the party’s power, then the threats to regime legitimacy might be eased.  If he stubbornly resists reform, he could lose the Mandate of Heaven.