 Han Fei’s immediate answer is that the ruler should protect himself through careful employment of the techniques of government depicted above. He should check his ministers’ reports, investigate their performance, promote or demote them according to the match between “performance” and the “name”; he should remain calm and secretive and let them expose themselves; he should encourage mutual spying and denouncement among his ministers. But this supposedly neat solution is problematic. First, it requires at times superhuman intellectual abilities of the ruler, in direct contradiction to Han Fei’s own insistence that his system fits an “average” (i.e., mediocre) sovereign (Han Feizi 40: 392). Second, it remains unclear how the ruler will gain access to reliable information if each of his close aides—as Han Fei reminds him—is a potential cheater (Han Feizi 6: 36–37). And third, a system which requires permanent surveillance of everybody can easily fall into a trap of totalitarian regimes in which “each agent charged with inspecting and controlling must logically be subject to inspection and control himself” (Graziani 2015: 175). Han Fei’s clear-sightedness with regard to ministerial machinations is remarkable, but it eventually entraps the sovereign in the nightmarish situation of comprehensive suspicion and mistrust.