The Great Way Is Simple: Dao-Governance Logic and Institutional Design for Global Civilization

When the World Gets Worse the More We Try to Save It, We Need a New Ruler

Original: Guoping Hua, The Great Way Is Simple: Dao-Governance Logic and Institutional Design for Global Civilization

When reading Guoping Hua’s The Great Way Is Simple, it is best not to approach it as a “global governance theory.” It is more like a person cornered by reality who turns around and asks a very simple question: Why, after all the money spent, meetings held, and agreements signed, does the world still resemble a perpetually leaking pump—the more we pump, the more it leaks?

The book opens with an exhausting picture. Where there is war, the international community rushes to mediate; where there is famine, humanitarian aid is airlifted urgently; where there is a pandemic, countries race to develop vaccines and seal borders overnight. The UN, G20, WHO, IMF—countless officials, scholars, and activists shuttle between conference halls and disaster zones. They are all hardworking and highly professional. Yet problems do not decrease; they multiply and grow more complex.

The author does not attribute the cause to “too many bad people” or “too few institutions.” He digs one level deeper: global governance over the past centuries has essentially been “problem-oriented”—identify the problem, find the cause, make a rule, enforce it. This logic looks highly rational and scientific, but it has a fatal blind spot: it keeps treating symptoms, never the root.

Why did the “democratic transformation” of Iraq fail? Not because the U.S. did not try hard enough, but because it measured a society dominated by sensation and emotion with its own ruler of “reason-led” governance. What ordinary Iraqis needed most was safety and livelihood, not electoral procedures and constitutional texts. Why did the WTO dispute settlement mechanism collapse? Not because the rules were poorly written, but because the enforcement end was strangled by hegemony. Rules are dead; those who enforce them are alive. When the enforcement end is controlled by the powerful, the rule of law becomes a tool of the strong against the weak. Why did the UN Security Council veto become a trap? Because the old paradigm tried to “balance power with power,” yet the balancer is itself power and can also corrupt.

These three cases point to the same conclusion: “problem-oriented” governance is forever passive, forever patching locally, forever failing to reach the root. The root does not lie in specific events but in the underlying structure of human relations.

Thus, the book completes its first and most crucial turn: from “problem-oriented” to “relation-oriented.” Instead of asking “What went wrong now?”, it asks: Is this relation good, evil, or private? Is it cooperative gain, ongoing harm, or mutual independence? Should I deploy management, guidance, or service?

This turn sounds simple, yet it is the foundation of the entire book. The author strips human relations of their political, economic, military, and cultural clothing and distills them into three basic forms.

First, good relations: cooperation and mutual fulfillment. When cooperation yields positive-sum outcomes, both parties move toward cooperation. Free trade, mutual aid, and inter-civilizational learning are all good relations. The book repeatedly discusses the European Coal and Steel Community: after WWII, France and Germany were mortal enemies, yet they placed coal and steel under a common high authority—whoever wanted to wage war had to ask that authority first. Institutional design of cooperation locked the switch of war. This is the institutionalization of good relations.

Second, evil relations: struggle and exclusion. When conflicting interests lead to zero-sum games, both parties move toward struggle. War, exploitation, oppression, and hegemony are all evil relations. The Rwandan genocide is the most glaring case: in 100 days roughly 800,000 people were killed, while peacekeeping troops were on the ground yet unable to stop the slaughter due to limits on their mandate. This is not “too many bad people”; this is absence of management, the absence of public coercive force precisely when it is most needed.

Third, private relations: independence and non-interference. When neither cooperation nor conflict is needed, each party proceeds independently. The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence are the classic expression of private relations. But private relations can also rigidify. Long-term isolation and refusal to engage may appear as “I won’t interfere with you, and you don’t interfere with me,” yet in reality they can lead to economic backwardness, technological stagnation, and suffering for the people.

The author does not treat good, evil, and private as static labels. He repeatedly warns: they transform dynamically, and often very fast. One sentence can forge good; one sentence can forge evil. Indifference calcifies into private; reignited conflict slides back into evil. Therefore, the core task of governance is not to label relations but to push them toward the good. To prevent judgment from becoming “hindsight,” he offers five diagnostic questions: Are the core needs of both parties complementary or mutually exclusive? Is there ongoing, verifiable harm? Is the exchange voluntary and information symmetric? Is the distribution of gains and harms acceptable? How high is the exit cost? The value of these five questions lies not in delivering a final verdict but in making relational judgment traceable, testable, and correctable.

Once the relation is diagnosed, the governance instrument follows. The book distills governance power into three forms: management, guidance, and service.

Management is yin: curbing evil with evil. Its essence is to use public coercive force to restrain public evil. It is not warm, not likable, even destructive. Yet in a world full of friction and conflict, without this yin force as a bottom line, the world would immediately descend into anarchic jungle. Management is not tyranny. The author places four shackles on management: internal restraint, obedience to higher authority, sunset clauses, and judicial review. He also poses four questions on the overreach of evil force: Was it authorized multilaterally? Is the purpose to stop evil? Are the means proportionate to the harm? Is it subject to oversight and correction? The same military action: the 1991 Gulf War was legitimate management, authorized multilaterally and aimed at stopping aggression; the 2003 Iraq War was overreach, bypassing the UN and aimed at regime change. The dividing line is right there.

Guidance is semi-coercive: promoting good through evil. It sits between coercion and freedom; it does not rely on armed threat but carries binding force; it forces learning but not choice. Guidance is difficult because different countries and classes judge in completely different ways. People in war zones judge with their bodies; religious societies judge with emotion; elites in developed countries judge with logic; philosophers judge with meta-cognition. If you apply reason-led guidance to a sensation-led population, it will inevitably fail. The failure of Western “universal values” export is essentially top-down forced indoctrination. Truly effective guidance is a dual-wheel drive of official and civil guidance. And the bottom line of guidance, as the author puts it well: you may “push,” but you must not “lock.” Pushing someone forward is education; locking the exit is domestication.

Service is yang: driving out evil with good. Its essence is to satisfy private good with public good. You provide public goods; others benefit, and you benefit too. This is not moral preaching; it is a redesign of the interest mechanism. What service fears most is the “charity trap”: giving money is not service, and aid may destroy the recipient country’s capacity for self-renewal. The IMF’s structural adjustment in Africa used a “rational judgment” template to crush the “sensory needs” of Africa’s grassroots; U.S. aid to Haiti sent large sums to American contractors, while Haiti’s agriculture and manufacturing were destroyed. Therefore, the author sets three principles for service: no political conditions attached, no dependency created, and respect for the recipient country’s agency. He also uses the “eleven desires of private good” as the human coordinate system for service goals: self-preservation, self-care, self-wealth, self-beauty, self-joy, self-pity, self-thought, self-confidence, self-strengthening, self-esteem, and freedom. Service depth has three levels: functional, emotional, and spiritual. Infrastructure is the most effective service because it is “blood-making” rather than “blood-transfusion,” “teaching people to fish” rather than “giving people fish.”

Here the book’s most brilliant structural layer appears: the three forces are not three parallel pillars but three keys to be dynamically matched to relational form. One-way governance always fails. Rwanda lacked management, guidance was maliciously exploited, and service could not enter—all three plates failed simultaneously. In Africa, the IMF pushed service alone while management was absent and guidance misaligned. In the Syria crisis, each agency managed its own patch with no unified command for the three forces. The common root cause is the fragmentation of the three forces.

The author therefore offers three launch modes: from the management end, military deterrence holds the line, guidance wins hearts, and service withdraws the fuel; from the guidance end, when a peace movement is blocked, management clears the way and service follows; from the service end, when service encounters executive distortion, management clears the way and guidance applies pressure.

Going further, the three forces intersect with three layers of objects: rulers, one’s own people, and state-to-state. Three times three equals nine—the nine-grid. Management of rulers is cross-border anti-corruption; management of one’s own people is joint law enforcement; management of state-to-state is a bottom-line alliance. Guidance of rulers is governance academies; guidance of one’s own people is the happiness community; guidance of state-to-state is a civilizational translator. Service to rulers is think-tank platforms; service to one’s own people is a public-good service alliance; service to state-to-state is infrastructure cooperation. The power of the nine-grid lies not in classification but in linkage. The Mekong River joint patrol is a typical cross-grid synergy: state-to-state management, people management, ruler management, people service, and state-to-state guidance—all happening at once. When one grid moves, the others follow. This is an “operating system,” not a “classification directory.”

But the book’s truly sharp proposition is not “there is no optimal institution”—that is the premise, not the conclusion. The truly sharp question is: since there is no optimal institution, how do we build one that is “not optimal but correctable”?

This is where The Great Way Is Simple distinguishes itself from ordinary global governance writings. Most writings stop at “institutions cannot be copied,” and then have nothing more to say. This book goes one step further: since institutions must be adapted, what devices ensure they do not rigidify, do not alienate, and do not become a new world emperor after adaptation?

The author’s answer is not a principle like “separate powers” or “supervise,” but a set of institutional devices that can be drawn on a blueprint.

Three-force proportioning answers “what power to use.” Management, guidance, and service are not three departments doing their own thing; they are three keys for different locks. In scarcity mismatch, management weight should rise to 60%, with the core task of “stopping the bleeding.” In substitution mismatch, guidance weight should rise to 50%, with the core task of “activation.” In predation mismatch, management weight should be overwhelmingly allocated to 70%, with the core task of “clearing obstacles.” In rigidity mismatch, guidance weight should lead at 60%, with the core task of “opening windows.” This is not an empty debate over “which is more important, management or service,” but adjustable parameters for “in this relational form, what proportion does each force take and from which grid do we start.”

Nine-grid linkage answers “whom to act upon.” Three forces multiplied by three layers—rulers, one’s own people, and state-to-state—form nine grids. The power of the nine-grid lies not in classification but in linkage. When one grid moves, the others follow. This is an “operating system,” not a “classification directory.”

Four shackles answer “how to contain power.” Power is not held in check by moral self-discipline but locked in place by institutional devices. Internal restraint: peacekeepers who sexually abuse civilians must be held accountable. Obedience to higher authority: the secretariat must not become a world president. Sunset clause: any coercive action expires within two years and must be re-approved. Judicial review: a global governance administrative court can rule council resolutions unconstitutional. These four shackles, plus “institutional self-diminution”—the mark of an institution’s success is not that it grows larger but that fewer matters need its intervention, with a quadrennial continuation review forcing it to answer “Do you still need to exist?”—form a governance closed loop of “can err, can correct, can exit.”

Six corrections answer “what to do when wrong.” Calibration audit first confirms whether the ruler measures the same thing. Data warning triggers automatically when indicators cross red lines. Third-party assessment prevents self-assessment. Judicial review rules on overreach. Sunset clauses prevent inertia. Institutional self-diminution prevents goal displacement. These six mechanisms are not isolated but a progressive correction chain: calibration audit confirms the ruler is trustworthy, data warning detects the problem, third-party assessment verifies it, judicial review rules on overreach, sunset clause forces re-examination, and institutional self-diminution pushes institutional exit. If any link fails, the others can compensate. This is the true meaning of “institutional design”: not designing an institution that never errs, but designing one where errors can be detected.

Falsifiable predictions answer “how to prove one might be wrong.” The sharpest cut is that it dares to expose where it is wrong. At the end of the book, seven testable predictions are listed, and a real case where the framework’s prediction failed is openly disclosed—the global COVID-19 vaccine distribution in 2021. According to the framework’s forecast, COVAX should have achieved over 40% vaccine coverage in low- and middle-income countries by the end of 2021 through guidance plus service; the actual figure was only about 10%. The author does not hide this but breaks the failure into three points: misjudgment of the stability of good relations in crisis, misjudgment of the direction of club effects, and misjudgment of the weight of service depth in emergency crises. The framework is then corrected accordingly: adding a crisis transformation acceleration parameter, adding a club-effect split risk warning, and adding a crisis amendment to the nine-grid proportioning. An institutional design framework that dares to place itself before unfavorable cases for testing is far more powerful than one that claims to be “always right.” This is also what distinguishes it from most “system writings”: it not only proposes claims but also discloses the full procedure for falsifying them.

So the truly brilliant part of The Great Way Is Simple is not that it repeats the premise “there is no optimal institution,” but that it answers “if not optimal, then how to build”—using three-force proportioning to answer “what power to use,” the nine-grid to answer “whom to act upon,” four shackles to answer “how to contain power,” six corrections to answer “what to do when wrong,” and falsifiable predictions to answer “how to prove one might be wrong.” This is what an “institutional design volume” should look like: not another book of reasoning, but a book of blueprints, parameters, gates, and exit mechanisms.

Part Five is assessment. The author offers two rulers. The first is the “six-dimensional social homeostasis check-up”: basic livelihood security, public order, social trust, conflict mediation, risk control, and future expectations. The core is not scoring and ranking but diagnosing mismatch: which dimension deviates from the reasonable range? How severe is the deviation? How does it interact with other dimensions? A country with fast GDP growth but declining social trust and low youth expectations may have a growth-model problem; a country with good public order but weak conflict-mediation mechanisms may be maintaining order through suppression.

The second ruler is “human-value HVM”: HVM = C × N × T × D, where C = C1 × C2. C1 is professional competence—the ability to know things and do things. C2 is need-recognition ability—the ability to know human nature and see people. N is the number of real beneficiaries. T is effective service duration. D is service depth. The multiplicative structure of C1 × C2 means: a team fully qualified professionally yet completely blind to its service objects has overall cognitive capacity of zero. The Haiti port project is typical: USAID engineers had high C1 but C2 close to zero—they looked at “what kind of port American aid should build,” not “what kind of port Haiti needs and who will run it after completion.” As a result, the project was abandoned ten years later, with effective service duration of zero. HVM is not a leaderboard but a diagnostic tool. It forces one question: beyond outputs, what did this project give people?

Going further, six institutional pathologies and six corrections. Scarcity mismatch needs stopping the bleeding; substitution mismatch needs activation; predation mismatch needs clearing obstacles; rigidity mismatch needs opening windows; security-failure mismatch needs repair; demand-side unemployment mismatch needs blood-making. The six corrections are: calibration audit, data warning, third-party assessment, judicial review, sunset clause, and institutional self-diminution. The purpose of this assessment system is not “to prove we are doing well” but “to test whether we are following the Way.” The final test has only four questions: Is it more stable? Is it safer? Is it more dignified? Is it better? When the people say it is good, it is truly good.

Part Six turns the lens toward the future. When AI replaces most labor, the “labor—income—survival” chain breaks. What keeps humanity alive? The author first clarifies: this is not a script of “AI utopia” or “AI doomsday.” It only answers two questions: What baseline rules are needed between humans and AI? When labor is no longer the premise of survival, what does society use to guarantee that “existence itself is value”?

The human-machine contract has seven bottom lines: human sovereignty, embodiment priority, transparency and explainability, data sovereignty, public-good assessment, accountability, and reserved human channels. The dignity economy has three pillars: unconditional basic security, social contribution credits, and lifelong learning accounts. The core of the dignity economy is not “supporting the lazy” but: basic security lets you survive, contribution credits let you live with dignity, and lifelong learning lets you have a future. Its philosophical foundation is Kant’s words: human beings are ends, not means. When AI removes the “labor” intermediary, humanity must face directly: dignity does not require any condition; existence itself is sufficient reason.

So this concise-reading version leaves only one sentence: when you face a concrete governance dilemma, you do not need to recall the whole book. Just ask three things: Is this a good relation, an evil relation, or a private relation? Should I use service, management, or guidance? Then go and do it.

The Great Way is simple. Simple, but not easy. Yet precisely because it is hard, it is worth doing.

The Position of This Book in the “Life-Spirit Structure Theory” System: The Missing Link Called “Institutional Design”

A thought system is often not established by a single “general theory” but by several books each covering one segment, biting into one another to form a skeleton. In Guoping Hua’s “Life-Spirit Structure Theory” system, the preceding volumes have already completed two major tasks: first, starting from the levels of consciousness, the eight factors, and the desires of private good, they have thoroughly explained “what is a human being”; second, starting from modes of judgment and the non-optimality of institutions, they have thoroughly explained “why governance cannot be copied.” But at this point, the system still hangs on one question: if human nature is understood and judgment is adapted, what specific institutions are used to carry it forward? How are institutions designed? How is power contained? Where does the money come from? How are errors corrected?

The Great Way Is Simple fills exactly this gap. It no longer asks “what is a human being” but asks: after understanding human beings, what kind of institutions can we build that are neither naive nor desperate? So in the system, this book is not another “reasoning” book but the institutional landing volume that turns from “understanding people” to “fulfilling people.”

In one sentence to locate it: Eleven Dimensions of Governance answers “what should governance be adapted to,” No Institution Is Optimal answers “why it cannot be copied,” and The Great Way Is Simple answers “then how exactly should it be built.”

It translates the philosophical judgments of the preceding volumes into operable institutional language. “Relation-oriented” is no longer just an intellectual turn but has become an operation panel: facing evil relations, management must be in place—using public coercive force to hold the bottom line; facing private relations, guidance must intervene—breaking barriers and raising cognition; facing good relations, service must be supplied—using public goods to materialize cooperative dividends. More critically, management, guidance, and service are not three parallel pillars but must be dynamically proportioned to relational form—scarcity mismatch calls for “stopping the bleeding,” substitution mismatch for “activation,” predation mismatch for “clearing obstacles,” and rigidity mismatch for “opening windows.” This is the operational proportioning table that the system has always lacked: not an empty debate over “which is more important, management or service,” but adjustable parameters for “in this relational form, what proportion does each force take and from which grid do we start.”

It turns “no world emperor” from an attitude into an institutional device. The system has always had a sober political-philosophical judgment: absolute power leads to absolute corruption; global power cannot be packed into a basket without external constraints. The Great Way Is Simple does not stop at the stance “I oppose a world government.” It breaks this judgment into executable institutional devices: horizontal separation of powers—decision-making, execution, and adjudication separated; vertical separation of powers—global institutions do not do everything, regional organizations take priority, and global institutions act as a “last resort”; four shackles—internal restraint, obedience to higher authority, sunset clauses, and judicial review; institutional self-diminution—the mark of an institution’s success is not that it grows larger but that fewer matters need its intervention, with a quadrennial continuation review forcing it to answer “Do you still need to exist?” This is a key advance in the system: previously it argued “there cannot be a world emperor,” and this book gives the institutional plan for “how to operate without a world emperor.”

It truly applies the principle of falsifiability to itself. The system has a valuable methodological self-awareness: theory is approximation, not equivalence; any framework must be prepared to be revised. The Great Way Is Simple pushes this self-awareness to its hardest degree. It openly lists seven testable predictions at the end of the book and openly discloses a real case where the framework’s prediction failed—the global COVID-19 vaccine distribution in 2021. According to the framework’s forecast, COVAX should have achieved over 40% vaccine coverage in low- and middle-income countries by the end of 2021 through guidance plus service; the actual figure was only about 10%. The author does not conceal this but breaks the failure into three points: misjudgment of the stability of good relations in crisis, misjudgment of the direction of club effects, and misjudgment of the weight of service depth in emergency crises. The framework is then corrected accordingly. In the system’s terms, this means: the preceding books established the honesty of “human studies,” and this book establishes the honesty of “institutional studies.” An institutional framework that dares to expose where it fails deserves to be called “correctable.”

It bridges the missing link from “human” to “institution.” Before The Great Way Is Simple, the system already had human nature theory, relation theory, judgment theory, and value theory. What was missing was: how do these things become a functioning institution, an executable rule, a correctable chain? The Great Way Is Simple answers: use three-relation diagnosis, three-force proportioning, nine-grid landing, six-dimensional check-up assessment, six-pathology diagnosis, six-correction repair, public-good taxation for funding, judicial review to manage the managers, and self-diminution to prevent alienation. This entire set is the institutional design volume in the system. It is not responsible for arguing “why human beings deserve to be fulfilled”—that is the business of the preceding volumes. It is responsible for answering: if human beings truly deserve to be fulfilled, what do institutions look like?

If we compare the “Life-Spirit Structure Theory” system to a building: the foundation is the levels of consciousness, the eight factors, and the desires of private good—what is a human being; the structural mechanics are the three relations of good, evil, and private, and judgment adaptation—how relations operate and why institutions cannot be copied; the construction blueprint is The Great Way Is Simple—how to proportion management, guidance, and service, how to design institutions, how to contain power, and how to correct errors. The preceding volumes tell you “what cannot be built” (no world emperor, no institutional template export, no indicator-based governance); this book tells you “what can be built, how to build it, and how to test it after building.”

This is its core positioning in the system: not another book of reasoning, but the only book that gives blueprints.