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Check the triggers for the events on the wiki. Many of the bad events only happen under certain conditions and you must try to avoid them. There are also many events which give you a choice if you want to gain or lose mandate or something else. If you have low mandate, you likely want the choice which gives mandate or which doesn't lose it, even if it costs something else. And you probably want to wait till you have 100 mandate till you pass a reform and make sure that you have as many passive mandate modifiers as possible, so that you spend less time below 50 mandate.
You can leave them unmaintained most of the time, but when you need them, turn them back on. Active forts reduce devastation quickly in addition to blocking enemies.
1. Don't take the mandate right away. There's no reason to rush it, except for the risk that another Ming releasable will take it once they pop out as Ming begins to collapse.
2. Check the wiki for your mission tree. Here's why: Some missions give a one-time boost of Mandate, but you can only see that reward if you have the mandate. But if you check the wiki, you can see which ones do, and then... don't click mission complete on any of those until later. Just let them sit. It'll be fine. You want that free mandate boost later more than you want the other mission rewards right now.
3. You get the Unify China CB against any country which possesses a province in the China subcontinent EXCEPT for Ming. With this CB, you get a free territorial core on any province you siege down and then annex in a peace deal. As noted, you DO NOT get this against Ming itself, so your strategy should be to never take provinces directly from Ming. Instead, whenever you fight Ming, just take full ducats, war reps, make them drop alliances (but not tributaries), and force them to pop out other countries (ones which border you in particular).
4. For provinces which only have Ming cores, the trouble is that you wouldn't be able to use the Unify China CB to get a free core there. This is where you need an ally, and the ally needs to be one which could create a core on that province. Bring the ally into the war with you and give those provinces to the ally in the peace deal. Let the ally core them and deal with the separatism rather than you. Guess what you just did... you just gave yourself Unify China CB on that ally. When you're feeling thick enough, drop the alliance and wait out the truce, and now you can attack the former ally and get free cores on those provinces due to the CB (whereas if you'd taken them directly from Ming, you'd have had to pay admin power to core them).
5. Hoard all those Ming ducats. Hoard them. You will need 7,500 ducats hoarded (if you're playing as a releasable; I can't say how much you'd need if you're and here's why: The great project in Beijing, "The Forbidden City", gives you +.05 mandate per month at max tier. As a Chinese Kingdom (not Ming), you have a mission "March to Beijing", and part of the mission reward is a free upgrade to The Forbidden City. Your strategy here is obvious - save the free upgrade for the most expensive tier. But in order to upgrade it at all, you have to have the mandate. So, hoard that 7,500 ducats, and hold off on clicking mission completion on that mission. Wait until later when you take the mandate and you can use the ducats to rush build tiers 1 and 2 of the great project, then hit the mission complete, and you have it at tier 3 with the big mandate boost.
6. Acquire a vassal in the north. Not one of the other Chinese Kingdoms, they will end up hating you because they want the mandate once you have it. Mongolia is a good choice. Oirat will want to integrate them early, so you can punch a Mongolia-cored province out of Oirat in a war and release Mongolia as your vassal. Then, feed your new vassal provinces along your northern border which aren't in the China subcontinent. The goal is to cut off any of the Steppe Nomad government countries from having any adjacency to any province in the China subcontinent. This prevents a future disaster from being able to occur once you take the mandate.
7. As you're repeatedly punching ducats and Chinese Kingdoms out of Ming, your goal is to surround Ming with your own territory so that nobody else should have any CB to attack them. So as those Chinese Kingdoms are popping, wallop them ASAP before they have a chance to get any allies or to attack Ming themselves. Eventually your objective with this is to control all of the China subcontinent yourself except for a single province that you've surrounded, in which Ming - still with the Mandate - exists, harmlessly awaiting their eventual consumption by you.
8. Have some provinces with devastation? Dev them a bit so the devastation goes away. Devastation penalizes mandate growth a lot, so you want it gone before you take the mandate.
9. Idea groups. Before you take the Mandate, you want to complete both Humanist and Court. Court gives you a .10 mandate growth modifier (big), and Humanist helps manage unrest (and thus when your mandate is low and raises your unrest, this helps offset that).
10. Secure some tributaries in advance, if you can. Get them feeling happy about you. Bear in mind that they'll get a liberty desire increase from low mandate, so things like government reforms and estate privileges which reduce subject liberty desire are best.
11. Keep your number of loans under 5, and keep your stability topped off at 3. These also affect mandate growth.
12. Once you have a devastation-free China subcontinent, you have your border with the Steppe Nomads guarded by a vassal, you've secured some tributaries, you have your hoarded ducats, your two idea groups I've noted are filled out, and you're capped up on manpower and land force limit, you're ready to finish Ming off and take the mandate.
From there, it's pretty smooth sailing. Only pass a reform when your mandate hits 100, so that it's reduced to only as low as 30. As long as you have missions that give one-time boosts to mandate, that's the moment you want to complete such a mission, since the boosts are often 20-25 and you can immediately be at neutral mandate and have no penalties. By doing that, I was able to relatively quickly breeze through several reforms and pick up the couple of reforms that themselves boost mandate growth, which only made future reform-passing go more rapidly.
In my campaign as Wu, I had finished every reform by about 1550 and never had any problems from it. No rebellions, etc. It's really been very easy, and all because I prepared in advance and I didn't rush into it.
Give these tips a try.
As mentioned, you want to be below 50 very shortly, so don't pass any reform if you're fighting and have devastation. Also, be at 100 Mandate before doing so.
And you don't need to hoard just for the big project, you have to build dam (or something similar) in many places otherwise you'll get what I believe is the worse event possible, flood. And it doesn't just happen once. You'll lose Mandate, stability, a bit of development and gain a lot of devastation in all provinces that are close to the river flooding the lands. And if I recall well, it's expensive to build everything.
The Mandate is pretty powerful but its mechanic can be hard to deal with at first.
Basically, just bully money (and don't take land) from any of these guys who aren't your ally or tributary, a lot, and you can do both things. Owning most or all of China but not yet taking the mandate also will give you really good general income, so you can sit on that with your little OPM Ming tucked safely away and bide your time awhile accumulating ducats to ensure that when you take the mandate, you've got that 7500 nest egg and the dams are upgrading or fully upgraded.
Depending on where exactly you happen to be located, your earliest wars with Ming will be the most profitable for ducat punching, so if they have tributaries you can get a CB on... go slap those tributaries once you finish your first Ming-slap, because Ming will get called in to help them. If you have decent allies/skill you can hit Ming 2-4 times before they start to really collapse very much and pull in a LOT of ducats.
You can change a lot of the surrounding area into Chinese cultures, actually, if you don't mind doing a ton of shifting of your primary culture, as follows:
1. Countries where the primary culture is Korean, Vietnamese, Zhuang, or anything in the Tibetan culture group can convert into Sino-Korean, Sino-Vietnamese, Sino-Zhuang, and Sino-Tibetan respectively, which are all a part of the Chinese culture group.
2. If you form Manchu, the Evenki culture group culture of Jurchen converts to Manchu in the Chinese culture group. In order to form Manchu, your primary culture needs to be Jurchen. Manchu is not an end-game tag, so you can still form other tags.
3. If you form Yuan, the Altaic culture group cultures of Mongol, Korchin, Khalkha, and Oirat all convert into Sino-Altaic in the Chinese culture group. You need any Altaic culture to be your country's primary culture in order to form Yuan. You don't have to start as a country with one of those cultures to achieve this. Yuan is an end-game tag, so you'd have to finish with this one.
None of these effects require the mandate, so you could do all of them at any time, if you wish, and if it's your goal you're better off doing it yourself rather than trying to bait other countries (if you did, they would have to have the dominant culture in their country be a Chinese culture, while having the to-be-sinicized culture as their primary culture, in order to trigger the decision - which would mean they'd need to own a fair bit of China before it could even be possible for them).
Be careful with letting other nations declare on a sufficiently weak Ming though- if they annex or vassalize and integrate it, the entire Emperor of China mechanic goes away.