The Implementation Framework of the People-First Principle: Making the Consensus Boundary Public and Anchored
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: The people-first principle is explicit, but principles do not implement themselves. Research on its content is saturated; research on the procedure of implementation remains a gap — this paper fills it. It first compiles the universal existence of the consensus boundary: it exists in most human groups — capital, religion, ethnicity; the biological fact that collective survival requires boundaries provides an analogous background. Eastern and Western civilizations offer different solutions to its form: the West prioritizes individual capability with an atomized society; the East prioritizes collective interest with group organization. The content of the Chinese consensus boundary is complete — the people-first principle and its normative expressions (people-centered development, life first, common prosperity, whole-process people's democracy), and its existing carriers are in operation. What is missing is the conversion procedure from principle to reality. The paper proposes four procedures: publicity — the boundary made explicit as a public repository of four sub-libraries, checkable by all; anchoring — rules of boundary adjudication (the harm criterion, the three-zone structure, incapacity exemption with transferred accountability) and requirements of presence (the knower's duty to state, the recognizer's right to judge); carrier — the digital platform governing information asymmetry in operation (functions already running; what is offered is carrier upgrading and efficiency optimization, starting at the grassroots, one matured layer at a time); verification — the people's felt experience as the criterion of maturity (active use is the people's real-time referendum on implementation). Together, the four procedures convert the people-first principle into a runnable and testable structure of governance.
Author: Liu Yong
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7214519903