The Mandate of Heaven is regularly compared with the Western doctrine of the divine right of kings, and the comparison is worth making because the two doctrines, superficially similar in claiming divine sanction for political authority, work in nearly opposite directions.
Divine right, articulated in early modern Europe by writers including Jacques-Benigne Bossuet and invoked by monarchs including England's James I, held that a legitimate monarch's authority comes directly from God, is transmitted by hereditary succession regardless of conduct, and cannot be justly resisted, since to resist the king is to resist God's own ordinance; the doctrine's entire political function was to foreclose the question the Mandate of Heaven keeps permanently open, whether a ruler's conduct might forfeit the right to rule. Divine right treats hereditary transmission as itself evidence of legitimacy, while the Mandate of Heaven treats performance as the only relevant evidence and succession as merely the ordinary, defeasible mechanism by which a mandate passes on.
The practical consequence is that Chinese political thought possessed from antiquity an authorized vocabulary for describing successful rebellion as legitimate rather than merely victorious, Mencius's blunt statement that killing a ruler who has lost the mandate is not regicide being the clearest instance; European political theory had to develop resistance theory, in figures like the Huguenot monarchomachs and John Locke, as a substantial departure from an established doctrine of near-absolute obedience, rather than inheriting a justification for removal already built into its foundational political theology.