I think I may know how the Anbennall Eunuch Kingdom, which caused anger among Chinese players, came about......
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Eunuchs have never been a social class. In China, eunuchs lack power and are the most loyal loyalists. Because the power of eunuchs cannot be inherited, eunuchs are discriminated against because they are incomplete individuals. Eunuchs also lack descendants, so they have no long-term goals and only consider immediate interests.
The emperor may indeed be deceived by eunuchs, but this is usually because the emperor personally does not want to wake up. The officials who truly deceive the emperor are his officials.
Powerful eunuchs can indeed form powerful factions, but the factions of eunuchs are not stable because their power comes from the emperor, from the emperor's trust and closeness. It does not come from blood, clan, relatives, common beliefs, or even relationships with college classmates.
So one of the abilities that the emperor needs to learn is to form a powerful faction of trusted eunuchs and engage in struggles with internal factions of officials. He needs to maintain the balance of this faction to ensure that officials can work in their spare time during the struggle.
So eunuchs have never been a problem, you can't simply graft the Mamluks onto China.
Simple answer:
There is usually just two sources of legitimacy, the pen and the sword, and in both aspects, the eunuch estate as a whole can never pose a real challenge towards the landed gentry.
In terns of the pen, it is hardly possible for eunuchs to gain stronger ideological influence than the Confucian scholar officials unless with the favor of the emperor. In terms of the sword, castrated men who never receive military training were just not good warriors (unlike the Mamluks, which were not castrated, and received proper military training).
The issue of late Imperial China (Ming, Qing) is that there is only one single enormous estate, the landed gentry. They owned land, which is the ultimate source of wealth in China's agricultural economy, thus can keep snowballing by purchasing more land over generations. On the other hand, they controlled the empire's ideology and administration, so there is no one, except perhaps the emperor, who can stop them from snowballing.
Indeed, there are also military estates like hereditary nobles, garrison officials and non-Han Chinese militants. However, their power were usually marginalized and monitored by scholar officials.
So the major challenge for an ambitious emperor is to balance the influence of the landed gentry. This is done by stirring up conflicts among different fractions of scholar officials, as well as by promoting other estates against them. The eunuchs are the most simple option, as they can neither accumulate land over generations, nor they receive military training that allows them to challenge the emperor's rule (so they are different from the Mamluks).
In general, the eunuch estate as a whole is in a weak position as compared to the scholar officials. There were just individual powerful eunuchs, gaining political influence and widespread connections, whose authority cannot be inherited.
Yes they may block some reforms, but they really don't have that much interest in doing so as compared to the landed gentry.
If an individual eunuch managed to gain enough wealth that allows him to challenge the gentry (which is highly unlikely), in most of the case, he will pursue to purchase more land, adopt a son and make him one of the landed gentries, rather than to challenge the existing gentry estate. If he gains military power and influence, then he will probably depose the existing emperor and proclaim himself the new one.
Fun fact: the founder of the Jaunpur Sultanate, Malik Sarwar, was an eunuch. Instead of establishing an eunuch republic or a strong eunuch regency behind the Delhi Sultanate, he
decided to adopt a son and establish his dynasty. Who cares about the welfare of other eunuchs, afterall?