Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.4, 2015

Contest or Mandate of Heaven: The Fall of the Qin and the Rise of the Han as Seen by Contemporaries

(Abstract)

Hou Xudong

Whether the great change in Chinese history wrought by the fall of the Qin and the rise of the Han should be interpreted as a contest between rivals or as bestowal of the Mandate of Heaven was an important issue for people at the time. Liu Bang’s founding of the Han Dynasty resulted from his victory over powerful rivals, a point he never denied when on the throne. The idea that the Han Dynasty emerged from a contest for power was imbued with the spirit of the times, which had left behind the Mandate of Heaven and had discovered “man.” As the question of the ruling order became ever more salient, the idea of the Mandate of Heaven again raised its head; the ambivalence in Sima Qian’s thinking on the subject derives precisely from the alternation of these two ideas in his day. Although the theory of “the Mandate of Heaven” was prized by the court, the idea that “the Han Dynasty has the Mandate of Heaven” had not been systematically addressed before Ban Biao wrote On the Mandate of the Ruler. Not a few of the contemporary discourses on the Mandate of Heaven were actually challenges to Han Dynasty rule, such as Sui Hong’s thesis, during the reign of Emperor Zhaodi, that “the Han Dynasty is descended from Emperor Yao,” and the popular story that “Huo Guang is a descendant of the Yellow Emperor.” In the Hanshu, Ban Gu’s interpretation of the fall of the Qin Dynasty and the rise of the Han followed his father’s ideas, initiating the historiographical practice of underwriting dynastic legitimacy that was to fetter the minds of so many of his countrymen.