Empress Wu Zetian establishes a permanent line of Chinese Empresses

TudorQueen

Banned
Chinese empress Wu Zetian firmly establishes her daughter, Princess Taiping, as the next Empress of China. A successful ruler, Princess Taiping establishes a line of empresses. What impact does this have on the Chinese culture and history?
 
possible implications

1: China becomes Matriarchal (unless the Mongols haven't been butterflied out).
2: No ongoing string of civil rights abuses.
3: Possibly no Chinese Communist Party.
4: The Empress and the Ladies who advise her will probably have the common sense to try to maintain technological parity with the Europeans.
5: Infanticide of baby girls has been butterflied away.
6: foot-binding gets butterflied out.
 

scholar

Banned
Chinese empress Wu Zetian firmly establishes her daughter, Princess Taiping, as the next Empress of China. A successful ruler, Princess Taiping establishes a line of empresses. What impact does this have on the Chinese culture and history?
It will end almost immediately after Wu Zetian's death. At best, it might last a few more decades and a few more empresses.

You might as well be asking what would happen if by a massive string of corruptions and intrigues a single female Pope enters the office, and then that female pope tried to ensure that all popes thereafter would be women.
 
Establishing a line of Chinese Women Emperors (Wu's title was 'Emperor') is possible, but it would require the viable Male claimants to have died prior to Wu Zetian's death/overthrow.

Wu Zetian was overthrown in a palace coup that used one of her son's as a figleaf, if all of her male descendants died prior (accidents, executions, poisoning, disease, etc.) then any conspirators would have to use either her daughter or her granddaughters as a puppet Woman Emperor.

Empress Wu played so many games with the succession I think it's obvious that she liked to avoid having a clear-cut heir to avoid having the heir be at the center of mass conspiracy against her. So as I said before, this would have to come about through an overthrow.

Now to make a line of Chinese Women Emperors stick (since having a MAN rule is embedded deep in China's psyche at this point) would require a historical accident of sorts. Either the 'Second Female Emperor' doesn't have any sons, her sons predecease her, or another conspiracy overthrows her in favor of another female figleaf.

But in the third case in order to solidify female Emperors as a viable force in China, she would have to establish herself separate from conspiracy and being a puppet. She would have to become a ruler in her own right, and figure out how having a husband would work, since Wu Zetian (as Emperor) had a string of lovers and no second husband. The 'Second Female Emperor' (whoever she was) might have been the puppet of her husband. It would be up to 'Third Female Emperor' to strike a balance.
 
If we will settle for "reign" but not "rule", I think it is easier to accomplish. Start with a series of successions in which their are only female heirs in which the women are allowed to reign while a regency (or shogunate?) actually rules. I'm not at all knowledgeable about Chinese history so I don't know if that sort of thing is a viable option. This could get the ruling classes invested in the legitimacy of a female line of succession and a permanent regency.

If you want a female emperor that has real power, kick it down the road several generations until female succession is unquestionably established and then have some skillful emperors start to return real authority to the throne. China seems to have enough crises in its history that there should be opportunities enough.
 
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If we will settle for "rein" but not "rule", I think it is easier to accomplish. Start with a series of successions in which their are only female heirs in which the women are allowed to reign while a regency (or shogunate?) actually rules. I'm not at all knowledgeable about Chinese history so I don't know if that sort of thing is a viable option. This could get the ruling classes invested in the legitimacy of a female line of succession and a permanent regency.

If you want a female emperor that has real power, kick it down the road several generations until female succession is unquestionably established and then have some skillful emperors start to return real authority to the throne. China seems to have enough crises in its history that there should be opportunities enough.

This would provide the chance for China to invent the Constitutional Monarchy, and have a Prime Minister run the country for his Empress...
 
I'd say this is impossible, and that's something I don't say for many situations.

Wu Zetian became a ruling Empress because of extraordinary personality and extraordinary circumstances. She was the exception, not the rule, and her accession was considered illegitimate by many because it went against several thousand years of Chinese culture. Before this, men had always occupied the Chinese throne. She barely became Empress, and there's no way she's getting her daughter to succeed her. One of the reasons she wasn't quickly and violently deposed was because she already reached a tacit agreement with the bureaucracy that the Tang imperial family would return to the throne after her reign. In fact, one of her sons, one of the former Emperors, was already Crown Prince after 698. And even if none of her sons were still around, there are a dozen of her husband's grandsons around, and probably hundreds of more distant members of the imperial family, all with a better claim to the throne under patrilineal succession than a princess.

Additionally, China didn't have a long-running tradition of monarchs who reigned rather than ruled because by the Tang, it was a well-established principle that any person with enough support (in times of peace this meant practically nobody but in times of war it meant any warlord with enough men and success) could become Emperor and establish a legitimate dynasty. No figureheads were needed.

In short, it's impossible for Wu Zetian to create a line of female empresses, which continues for any length of time.
 
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