Revelations from Wang Ji's Advanced Deeds | 1% Unreliability Is 100% Risk
The wise ancients paid close attention to "gaps" (隙), often lamenting that "a miss of a hair's breadth leads to an error of a thousand li" — those were visible gaps: a crack in a wall can bring down the entire wall; a breach in a dike can collapse a thousand li of embankment. Today, Wang Ji also pays close attention to "gaps," but these gaps are imperceptible to the naked eye.
In 1996, a news report deeply moved Wang Ji. Shortly after a foreign rocket lifted off, it deviated from its preset flight trajectory, then broke apart and triggered a violent explosion. The cause was a critical software defect in the guidance system that caused problems in the processing of velocity data. At that moment, he was seized by alarm and asked himself repeatedly: what if it were our code that had the error? From that point on, this question was etched deep into his mind, forged into that weighty admonition — "1% unreliability is 100% risk."
This is not a simple math problem; it is a profound dialectic of success and failure. Wang Ji frequently reviews those cases that shocked the world: during the Gulf War, a certain country's air defense missile failed to intercept an incoming missile due to a control software defect, causing heavy casualties; at the turn of the century, the "Y2K bug" triggered global panic… In his eyes, these "lessons from those who came before" are not news items to be glanced at and forgotten, but a "Sword of Damocles" hanging over his head at all times.
The battlefield is an extreme contest of life and death. Failing to achieve absolute certainty means that a single failure leads to total failure. Especially in the era of informatized and intelligentized warfare (信息化智能化战争), the fatal "ant holes" that constrain equipment performance and determine victory or defeat on the battlefield are not only the obvious hardware damage, but also the latent vulnerabilities concealed within underlying code, algorithmic logic, and system linkages. This category of risk is highly concealed, difficult to identify, and has a long incubation period. It may appear negligible, yet in reality harbors fatal hidden dangers capable of overturning the entire situation.
The era-defining imperative of achieving self-reliance and self-strengthening in core national defense technologies has determined that China's defense scientific research has no external space for error tolerance and backstop support. China's underlying foundational software and high-assurance core technologies have long faced external technological barriers; there is no buffer zone in which foreign technology can correct errors or external forces can fill gaps. It is precisely for this reason that Wang Ji, grounded in the hard security requirement of autonomous and controllable systems, proactively cultivated deep expertise in the field of high-assurance software technology — building a theoretical framework from scratch, leading the formulation of industry standards, and over decades of quiet, determined effort holding the line on core technology security. He transformed "preventing problems before they arise" into an operational methodology. He and his team work like surgeons, scrutinizing every line of code under a microscope, exhausting every category of extreme operating condition, and with an attitude of ultimate rigor in scientific research, severing risk transmission chains at the source, sealing systemic security vulnerabilities, and permitting no single software "cancer cell" to survive.
"Tenacious dedication, excellence in craft, meticulous care, pursuit of excellence (执着专注、精益求精、一丝不苟、追求卓越)" — in November 2020, at the commendation ceremony for national model workers and advanced workers, Chairman Xi expounded on the profound connotations of the artisan spirit (工匠精神) in these terms. Over many years, Wang Ji has upheld the scientific research credo of "1% unreliability is 100% risk," leading his team to develop a "toolbox" targeting software reliability problems of different types across different domains, making important contributions to the reliability and safety of critical software in major national and military program engineering projects. This is precisely a true embodiment of military scientific research workers in the new era carrying forward the artisan spirit.
Those who achieve great things build on solid foundations; those who aim far guard against superficiality and pretension. Wang Ji has devoted a lifetime of wholehearted dedication to the front lines of national defense scientific research, safeguarding the security of major-power equipment to a standard approaching the absolute, and setting a clear benchmark for the national defense scientific research community in the new era. We should take Wang Ji as our model, and with high-assurance scientific research achievements, underpin a high-level foundation for winning wars.