The Mandate

The Mandate is the largest single state on Earth: about 2.2 billion people in one union. There are no elections in the Mandate; examined officials rule with Vault advice, and keep the masses fed because they have studied every revolution in history.

The name

The name comes from China's Mandate of Heaven, which holds that rulers keep power only while the people are fed and safe, and that famine and revolt prove the mandate lost. Its citizens are Mandate citizens; its dissidents talk about the day the Mandate is lost.

How it began

1. Leases and protectorates (2030s–2070s). Chinese farms and workers move into the shrinking Russian Far East; China extends maritime protection over the drowning coasts of the South China Sea, and Sri Lanka, whose southern port China already leases, becomes a protectorate.
2. The Parasol quarrel (2090–2130). China leads the hot nations in seeding the stratosphere, with India a reluctant partner. When the monsoon fails, India blames the Chinese programme. Blame is unprovable, and the rivalry of the 2020s hardens into a cold war (see The Parishad).
3. The Inheritance (2110s). Famine and a succession fight break Moscow. Russia's nuclear command invites Chinese custody rather than let regional strongmen seize warheads, and the Custody Treaty of 2116 makes Russia an autonomous province under China, with Belarus following. One custodian of the warheads suits everyone, as it did in 1994. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, tied to Moscow and in China's debt, come under Chinese protection.
4. The Act of Union (2140s). China binds its provinces and protectorates into one union under one Council (see Who rules at the top).
5. The Indus Line (2150s). Pakistan breaks apart under heat and debt. The Mandate takes the north and west, a long corridor from Gilgit to Gwadar; the Parishad takes the Indus plains (see The Parishad). The line runs between Islamabad, the corridor's seat, and Rawalpindi, which went to the Parishad with the rest of Punjab.
6. The African provinces (2150s–2190s). Belt and Road debts and protection treaties bring Africa north of the equator into the union.

How it rules

• Rule by examination, no vote. The Settlement examines its voters; the Mandate examines its rulers. Officials rise through competitive exams descended from China's imperial examinations. Nobody votes for them.
• The masses are catered for. Food, housing and health are guaranteed, like the Settlement's floor, but by the state's promise rather than by law: nobody can claim them in court, and they can be made conditional on registration or good behaviour, or withheld from a dissident or a troublesome province. Renewal is held the same way: a court can cut it, the shortened term (see Justice under long lives).
• Vault-advised. The Mandate's two Vaults forecast unrest, harvests and water (and weather control; see Open questions). Officials whose provinces cross the Vaults' unrest thresholds are removed. Critics call this government by restlessness index.

Everyday network access

Only Level 1 protected access is officially available: basic communication, essential services, education and a state-supervised reference library. It also carries approved dramas, music, sporting coverage and other selected entertainment. Independent forums, unrestricted interactive games and privately chosen immersive worlds belong to the prohibited Level 2. Banned material is also prohibited in private messages; enforcement depends on censorship and policing, and people find ways around it. Wealth, influence and official connections can secure access, but it can be withdrawn (see Who pays, in Everyday technology).

Who rules at the top

Examinations supply the Mandate's administrators; they do not by themselves decide who governs. The Act of Union of the 2140s sets out the rest.

• The Council. The union is governed by a council co-opted from the highest-ranked examined officials. Each member serves one fixed term of twenty-five years and cannot return. The rule was written as repair medicine began to stretch lives towards 150 years, and it came first: the Settlement borrowed the idea for its Rotation Laws of the 2380s.
• When the Vaults deadlock. The Mandate's two Vaults are both China's and are asked the same questions. When they disagree, the Council decides by vote.

Why it holds together

Water is its strongest lever and its sorest point. The Brahmaputra, the Indus and the Sutlej rise in Tibet, and the Indus runs through Gilgit before it reaches the Parishad's plains, so Tibet and Gilgit are the most guarded ground in the Mandate. Absorbed Russia gives it the Arctic coast, the Northern Sea Route and the permafrost-stabilisation grid that keeps Siberia's cities standing. Nigeria gives an ageing union a young population.

Its fault lines

• The Parishad frontier. India and China disputed their Himalayan border and the Brahmaputra's water in 2026; in 2497 the dispute runs the length of a bloc frontier. The corridor from Gilgit to Gwadar is wedged between Parishad Afghanistan and the Indus plains and supplied only over the Karakoram, and Sri Lanka lies just across a narrow strait from the Parishad's southern coast. The Brahmaputra Crisis of the 2470s, when the Mandate held back the river in a drought year, was the standoff's closest call on Earth (see The Parishad).
• Russians as a minority. Russia was absorbed rather than conquered, and Russians are a minority in their own refuge. Vladivostok has taken back its Chinese name, Haishenwai.
• The Raised. The Mandate has recognised the Raised as persons since the 2390s, when it needed to deal with Freehold as one power with another, but no Raised mind has risen high among its examined officials, and few are trusted with power. The fear goes back to the Lanzhou Killings of the 2260s, when hothouse minds raised as weapons in an illegal laboratory broke out and killed more than two thousand people. Few in the Mandate could tell a hothouse mind from a Raised one, and many still do not try. The Mandate employs Freehold's crews on Mercury all the same, and pays Freehold the smallest share of any array.
• The empty provinces. North Africa and the Sahel are claimed but thinly peopled; the Sahel Greening is resettling them under Mandate rule.
• The ice. The Mandate holds the Pacific third of the old Antarctic continent, from 120°E to 90°W, taken in the Southern Claims of the 2160s (see Earth in 2497). Australia never accepted the loss of its old claim's eastern end, so the ice line is a frontier with the Settlement. The Mandate mined its West Antarctic islands at first, outside the Ice Law's reach, then closed them as protected ground.
• The Settlement's mirror. Settlement critics call the Mandate an oligarchy of the examined. Mandate critics answer that the Settlement is the same thing with ballots, and that the Mandate at least feeds everyone without making them sit an exam.

Beyond Earth

In the solar system the Mandate holds Jupiter's moons, half of Mars and half of the Moon's south pole, about a third of the roughly 3 billion people off Earth (see The solar system divided). Almost all of them are genetically adapted to their worlds, by state plan (see Designed children, in Ageing slowed, not ended). Beyond the solar system it has no colonies yet. Three light seed ships are in flight, launched for resources and prestige alongside the Line and Belt ships of the 2470s, to Barnard's Star, Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti. The Mandate never signed the Lifeboat Laws, and its ships carry embryos to be raised on arrival by AI crews, the practice the Laws forbid. The Settlement already disputes the standing of the colonies they will found.

On Mercury the Mandate probably holds the biggest array, about 45–60 TW in 2497 (see The Mirror Race). The Halcyon Breach of 2418 was a theft from its Vaults: a gatekeeper team smuggled replicator designs to an Open City faction, then defected to the Open Cities, and the designs reached the Parishad too.