Chapter eighty is difficult to place beside the rest of the book, and the difficulty is worth stating rather than smoothing over.
Most of the political chapters advise a sovereign of a large state. Chapter twenty-six addresses the lord of ten thousand chariots. Chapter sixty compares governing a large state to cooking a small fish. Chapter sixty-one works out how great states and small ones should deal with each other, and assumes the great one is the reader. Chapter sixty-two imagines the book being presented at an enthronement.
This chapter wants the state to be small and the people few, which is not advice a ruler of a great power can act on, and it is not obviously advice at all. It is a picture.
Two readings are common and both have support. On one, the chapter is nostalgic or utopian, describing a condition before the growth of territorial states and offering it as a standard against which the present is measured, which fits the book's habit of appealing to the ancients. On the other, it is the logical endpoint of non-action in government, showing what a population left entirely alone would settle into, which fits chapter fifty-seven, where the people become the uncut block by themselves.
Neither reading makes it a programme, and the chapter proposes no route from a large state to a small one.
Its influence has nonetheless been considerable, and later Chinese writing about withdrawal, self-sufficient villages and the good life outside the reach of administration returns to this chapter more than to any other in the book.