The reconfiguration of political legitimacy toward "modern" political concepts and rubrics began decades before the end of the Qing. While the "Mandate of Heaven" (tianming 天命) may have been used metaphorically afterwards and was stubbornly clung to, for a short while, by very conservative intellectuals after 1911, it was dead long before the Qing fell. From the 1860s onward, a whole lineage of intellectuals and officials (e.g., YAN Fu, KANG Youwei, LIANG Qichao, etc.) put political legitimacy on very different terms. KANG Youwei, for example, envisioned a "Great Harmony" (datong 大同) that combined some elements of Confucian utopianism with modern ideas about political community and governance -- even if one reads his writings as a defense of the emperorship (which is debatable at times), it is an emperorship that is based on very different notions than the Mandate of Heaven. This intellectual sea change was connected to the rise of evolutionary thinking (progress, survival of the fittest) as well as Euro-American political concepts (citizenship, democracy, republicanism, constitutionalism, socialism, anarchism, etc.). Perhaps no better example of the bankruptcy of the old mode can be found than the attempt by YUAN Shikai, who was then president, to declare himself emperor in late 1915 and early 1916. The new empire survived a mere 83 days before YUAN himself ended it.

In broader terms, the New Qing history (since the 1980s) has broadened our understanding of the Manchu dynasty and the multiple bases for its legitimacy. The Qing rulers put forward a version of emperorship that was no longer confined to the Confucian mode (i.e., the Mandate of Heaven), but instead established a multi-ethnic sovereignty that deliberately addressed and appealed to very different constituencies in very different ways. Toward Tibetans, for example, Qing emperors like Qianlong portrayed themselves as Buddha-incarnate and patronized the Tibetan Buddhist establishment lavishly, making use of ideas and iconography of the Buddhist Wheel-Turning King. The loyalty of Manchus was secured using very different strategies, including the creation and promotion of Manchu-myths, codification of shamanistic ritual repertoires, invention of Manchu script, and imperial attention to the socio-economic interests of the bannermen. Hui Muslims were patronized in specific ways too. In this new view of the Qing, the Han Chinese are just one of the constituents within the empire -- the Mandate of Heaven and other accouterments of Confucian legitimacy became just one of a number of rhetorical, symbolic, and material strategies the Qing rulers used to secure the loyalty of its subjects. This is not to suggest a completely cynical understanding of Qing rulership, but that the Qing empire had already moved far beyond the narrow confines of the Mandate for building its political legitimacy in an empire that was extending far beyond its central core (Han) areas.

Sources? Too many to cite. Some relevant ones include:

Chang, Hao. Liang Ch'i-Ch'ao and Intellectual Transition in China. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.

CHANG HAO: "Intellectual change and the reform movement, 1890-1898", in: Twitchett, Denis and Fairbanks, John (ed.): The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 11, Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911, Part 2 (1980). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 274–338, esp. 283-300, 318-338.

Benjamin I. Schwartz (1964). In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Zarrow, Peter. After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885-1924. Stanford University Press, 2012.

Harrison, Henrietta. The Making of the Republican Citizen: Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911-1929. Contemporary China Institute Series, Oxford University Press; 2000.

Harrison's study of a rural literati's diary provides a counterpoint to much of my comments above. Many older, more traditional people continued to view the state through Confucian-colored glasses. See: Harrison, The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man’s Life in a North China Village, 1857-1942, Stanford UP, 2005.

Rawski, Evelyn. The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions. (University of California Press, 1998)

Elliot, Mark. The Manchu Way The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China. Stanford UP, 2002.

Crossley, Pamela Kyle. A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology. (University of California Press, 1999).

Chang, Michael. A Court on Horseback: Imperial Touring and the Construction of Qing Rule, 1680-1785. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center/Harvard University Press, 2007.