Imperial China, despite any westernization it could have undergone, simply was not built to thrive as a modern day constitutional monarchy.

[AllthetTropesMan]

Whenever discussion of the late Qing is widespread on this forum, a single poster or more will often steer the discussion to modernization attempts made under the Self-Strengthening Movement and the Hundred Days Reforms, as well the intentions of Prince Gong; while this sort of wishful thinking is usually accompanied by acknowledgement of the radical shifts in Chinese policy and mindset that would have been required for this process to even begin properly, as well as the factor of western ethnic groups hostile to the Qing and determined to take advantage of their weakness. What I've never heard in coversation is how an attempt to Westernize the the traditional Chinese monarchy would have led to clash between liberal constutionalism and the concept of divine mandate. The Mandate of Heaven sound downright contradictory when measured by the standards of European political thought: it preaches a sanctity of the emperor similar to the divine right of kings, but at the same time enshrines the duty of revolt within its very core, something more obviously republican and therefore less tolerable under under the dynasties of the west. Factoring all this in, the only way fro China to remain true to its dynastic roots while implementing modern-style government would be if one looked to liberal Britain for a solution, but the even the following is sketchy due to cultural differences: the Revolution of 1688 was the climax of a long line of Parliamentary victories against royal absolutism, which depending on one's historiography can be traced back to the Tudors and early Stuarts or as far back as the Barons' Wars , each establishing the rising supremacy of the estates over undiluted royal decree. By the eighteenth century, it was clear that while the monarch held primacy over the English and Scottish Churches as well as general policy, the power of day to day legislation was in the hands of the two houses. An attempt to implement something similar in China--where a parliamentary body could depose an uncooperative sovereign at will, or even dynasty as a whole--would have thrown up legal crises at what was probable grounds for removing the former or the latter, as well as created multiple claimants from rival families, up and coming politicians and disgraced members of the royal family. This alone would set up multiple constitutional issues, ecspecially when Parliament tries to get rid of a problematic monarch without the tradition al "sign of heaven"--natural disasters, civil unrest, bad harvests, etc.--and would require a complete overhaul of view the Chinese traditionally viewed their son of heaven, with him being reduced from hegemon over the whole civilzed world to just another sovereign subject to international and parliamentary law. The only way any of this could begin to happen was if two factors happened to be in place. First, the Qing needed to reconnect with the people of China by setting aside the Manchu cultural dominance of the imperial court and striving for a doctrine of unity similar to the OTL Republic's five races under one flag, and second, the idea of the emperor would have to be radically altered to fit in wit the models present in Korea and Japan, where instead of heavenly governors appointed at will the concept was instead that of a ceremonial family hovering over the beauracracies of state and presiding oonly over nation states.

TLDR: Any attempt by Qing China to constitutionalize in the model of Japan or western Europe would ultimately fail due to the fact that the cyclical nature of the Chinese monarchy could not be made compatible with the demands of liberalism and legalized transitions of power, and to over come this the imperial court would have had to make massive changes to how it consolidated power as well as how it propogated the idea of the son of heaven,

 

[SealTheRealDeal]

I think you're putting too much emphasis on parliament's ability to replace a monarch. It's not really a common thing in British history, and it's even rarer beyond the Isles.

 

[Arkenfolm]

That's rather deterministic. It isn't like a Chinese parliament would be deposing the monarch since in China that happened only as the result of coups, and usually when the monarch was incredibly incompetent or deeply unpopular to begin with. Which is more or less when it happened in England for that matter.

The Mandate of Heaven sound downright contradictory when measured by the standards of European political thought: it preaches a sanctity of the emperor similar to the divine right of kings, but at the same time enshrines the duty of revolt within its very core, something more obviously republican and therefore less tolerable under under the dynasties of the west.

There's nothing inherently republican about the right of revolt. I doubt that right would even be written into a Chinese constitution. Do most monarchies even have that written in their constitution? In Britain, the right only exists on the basis of precedent which arguably goes back to the days of Germanic tribal assemblies which could elect or depose a king. So it would be the same thing here--in Imperial China, that right would only exist on the basis of historical precedent and thousands of years of Chinese political thought.

the idea of the emperor would have to be radically altered to fit in wit the models present in Korea and Japan, where instead of heavenly governors appointed at will the concept was instead that of a ceremonial family hovering over the beauracracies of state and presiding oonly over nation states.

How is that a very radical change? In practice, the Chinese Emperor and his family being a ceremonial family presiding over a bureaucracy is exactly what happened many times in Chinese history. There's also no reason a "House of Lords" type body (as seen in Japan) couldn't exist, or for that matter a high number of princes retaining their privileges and heading governments (as also happened in Japan).

Yes, the idea of universal suffrage, one man one vote, or liberal democracy in general would be very hard to implement in China for many decades, and possibly ever since Imperial China will be inherently more conservative than the monarchies of Western Europe or the People's Republic of China or even the Republic of China. And I suppose there's a likelihood that it begins a process that leads to a republic and the end of the Qing, or alternatively prolongs the Qing long enough by letting them ignore social issues that they end up overthrown in a leftist coup akin to the Ethiopian Empire (which had become a constitutional monarchy in its last decades). Or it could reform into a constitutional, modern, but non-democratic state like the modern Confucian thinker Jiang Qing has proposed (albeit overtly "Imperial" since Jiang Qing's Constitutional Confucianism imagines a hypothetical reform in the People's Republic of China).

Japan and Thailand would be fine examples of two nations with distinct non-Western conceptions of their ruler which transitioned to constitutionalism. Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Ethiopia would be examples of nations which attempted to do so but the era of constitutionalism was ephemeral and contributed to the end of the nation.