"Role Model of the Era" Wang Ji: A Trailblazer in the Field of High-Assurance Software
"Role Model of the Era" Wang Ji — A Trailblazer in the Field of High-Assurance Software
■ Sun Jiaxin
Photo ①: A childhood photo of Wang Ji. Archival photo
Photo ②: Wang Ji (center) discussing with students in the library. Photo by Fan Junwei
Photo ③: Wang Ji conducting research in his office. Photo by Fan Junwei
Photo ④: Wang Ji during his university years. Archival photo
Photo ⑤: At a public interview event organized by the university, Wang Ji answers questions from media reporters. Photo by Han Qiyang
(All photos except archival photos are distributed by Xinhua News Agency)
At 4 p.m. on June 3, 2026, just after a rain, the bitter fragrance of camphor trees drifted through the moist air.
At the Science and Technology Achievements Hall of the College of Computer Science at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), I met Wang Ji for the first time.
He sat in a wheelchair, smiling: "Sorry to have kept you waiting."
Inside the hall, a lifelike statue of Mr. Ci Yungui stood on display. Wang Ji occasionally tilted his head to look up at the statue, his expression very calm. His wheelchair was old; the leather on the armrests had worn through, exposing the gray-white metal beneath. He sat in the wheelchair with his back held perfectly straight.
"Why not get a motorized wheelchair?"
"This one still works. The doctor said that hand-cranking exercises my upper limb function and cardiopulmonary function." He smiled. "I follow my doctor's advice."
As they spoke, several people came over and together lifted the wheelchair down the steps in front of the Science and Technology Achievements Hall. Wang Ji sat in the wheelchair, his body leaning slightly forward. Just as everyone exerted their effort, he suddenly spoke, his voice quiet: "Watch your backs — none of us are getting any younger."
Everyone laughed.
There is a kind of "paradox" about Wang Ji.
He moved too fast — entering university before the age of 14, being promoted to associate professor at 28, becoming a full professor at 33 … and then, late one night at the age of 43, he suddenly collapsed, his life hanging by a thread, ultimately losing both legs.
Yet he got back up, pushed his wheelchair forward, and kept charging ahead.
I.
In Wang Ji there is a contradiction between "slow" and "urgent." He speaks in an orderly manner, at an unhurried pace, with a gentle expression. Yet the cause he pursues demands that he be urgent.
In the 1990s, software engineering, as a critical component of national defense science and technology modernization, was elevated to an unprecedented strategic priority. Yet China's software industry at that time was like a toddler taking its first steps — still in its infancy.
Around that time, a foreign rocket had just exploded due to a single line of erroneous code, and a foreign company had paid a devastating price of 500 million dollars for a floating-point division flaw in a chip — a flaw that should have been nearly impossible to occur. Wang Ji came to a profound realization: once software becomes untrustworthy, the losses it can cause are incalculable.
So he chose to research "high-assurance software technology (高可信软件技术)." In his own words, it was like opening a "software hospital."
This was a research field that was too narrow, too obscure, and too unlikely to yield results. From 2000 to the present, Wang Ji has pressed forward with his head down on this unpopular track. "Scientific research is not a sprint chasing hot topics, but a marathon resonating in step with the nation's needs (科研不是追热点的短跑，而是一场与国家需求同频共振的马拉松)." Over more than twenty years, this phrase has been constantly on his lips.
From then on, the laboratory became Wang Ji's second home.
On one occasion, while developing a complex software verification system, the team hit a technical bottleneck that lasted for months. A sense of helplessness and frustration gradually spread among team members. Wang Ji gathered everyone together and said: "Scientific research is like climbing a mountain — difficulties cannot stop our steps. We work on high-assurance software precisely because we specialize in gnawing on hard bones (啃硬骨头). If we can't find a path, we'll carve one out."
The team rallied, repeatedly studying the scant foreign literature available, digesting those abstruse theories bit by bit, combining them with the specific requirements of defense engineering, and continuously trial-and-erroring — until they finally succeeded in developing an efficient software reliability measurement tool.
Wang Ji's battlefield has no smoke of gunpowder. His adversaries are time, the technology gap, and code vulnerabilities that could appear at any moment. His weapons are a keyboard, algorithms, a mind that never stops turning, and a perseverance that never stops.
He once said that only by conducting frontier research does one more easily discover the frontier. This phrase, which sounds like a tongue-twister, is a distillation of his philosophy of scientific research. He also said: the person who blazes a trail through the deep mountains and old forests is always the first to see the sunrise.
Wang Ji is that trailblazer.
Around 2012, a "hard bone" came knocking.
A certain department urgently sought help: a class of system software was experiencing intermittent numerical defects and code interruptions — two problems that could cause mission control to produce unexpected results. After analysis, Wang Ji reached a conclusion: existing domestic software tools could not detect this class of defects; this was a technical gap that required innovative methods to fill.
When he accepted the task, he did not hesitate: "High-assurance software research exists precisely for this. They came to us because they trust us — no matter how difficult, we have to charge forward."
The difficulties, however, were even more intractable than imagined. The advanced international technique suited to solving this class of problem is called "abstract interpretation (抽象解释)," and the mainstream tool supporting it is written in an extremely obscure programming language — one that no one on Wang Ji's team knew.
Retreat? Those two words do not exist in Wang Ji's dictionary. He made the call on the spot: "Everyone learns it from scratch together!"
At the most critical juncture of the effort, time moved into January 2013.
Winter in Changsha: damp and cold. Wang Ji recalled that the sun was rarely visible during those days.
"On January 22nd, I got home after 10 p.m. Around 2 a.m. on the 23rd, I was jolted awake by excruciating pain." Wang Ji still smiled as he recalled this, as though telling someone else's story. After political commissar Li Han and his wife Huang Chun sent him to the hospital, because his mental state remained relatively good, no one yet knew that he was suffering from aortic dissection — an extremely dangerous condition.
A 13-hour cardiac aortic replacement surgery, bilateral high-level thigh amputations, multiple debridements, flap grafts, arterial embolization procedures … over the course of six months, Wang Ji underwent more than ten surgeries in total.
When he awoke in the intensive care unit, both legs were gone.
"During that period — did you ever feel despondent?"
"Honestly, my memories of that time are actually quite muddled," Wang Ji said. "Even now, I often feel as though my legs are still there."
Though he had lost his legs, Wang Ji "stood" back up.
"As long as my brain can still think and my hands can still move, I will not stop."
Once out of danger, Wang Ji's thoughts remained fixed on the unfinished project. During that period, with tubes still in his body, he would often call team members to his hospital room to work through algorithms and revise plans together. Sometimes, when disagreements arose, their debates grew quite heated.
Finally, after more than a year, a prototype tool capable of precisely detecting software numerical defects and code interruption problems was born.
In January 2025, the research results of Wang Ji's team received a First Prize in the Military Science and Technology Progress Award (军事科学技术进步奖一等奖).
Wang Ji said he enjoys listening to audiobooks on WeChat in his spare time. He is particularly fond of Shi Tiesheng's Notes from the Sick Bed (《病隙碎笔》).
Shi Tiesheng worked out the meaning of life and death in the Temple of Earth; Wang Ji, between illness and perseverance, worked out something else: a person can be destroyed, but cannot be defeated.
"I know my own body. Research projects cannot wait, and the nation can wait even less."
I think Wang Ji is a person who has calculated things very clearly — every ounce of his energy has been spent where it counts most.
II.
During the interview, Wang Ji said this: "I am a scientist; first and foremost, I am a soldier."
In the summer of 1983, Wang Ji, not yet 14 years old, sat the college entrance examination (高考), scoring high enough for Peking University or Tsinghua University. His mother, Liu Guizhi, asked him what subject he wanted to study. The young Wang Ji answered without hesitation: "Computer science!" At the time, the computer science program at the National University of Defense Science and Technology (今国防科技大学, abbreviated NUDT) was already renowned nationwide. So that autumn, Wang Ji became the youngest undergraduate student in the computer science department of the National University of Defense Science and Technology.
Not long after enrolling, one day in a spacious lecture hall, the new students sat quietly in their seats, the atmosphere solemn. Suddenly, from a broadcast speaker hanging in the corner of the classroom, a steady and stirring voice rang out: the "Galaxy-I (银河-Ⅰ)" hundred-million-operations-per-second supercomputer, developed by the NUDT Computer Research Institute, had officially passed national appraisal and been successfully completed!
After a brief silence, the entire campus erupted. The cheers of students seemed about to lift the roof off the building. This was the moment when a nation, after years of being "strangled at the throat (卡脖子)" in computing speed, finally held its head high.
Wang Ji was very quiet. His thoughts seemed to pass through the walls of the classroom and fly toward the Galaxy Building that had just been completed. The success of "Galaxy-I" struck his young heart like a bolt of lightning.
At the time, although NUDT was a military academy, the students it enrolled did not wear military uniforms. Walking around campus, he often could not help stopping to look at the sentries in their crisp military uniforms, at the green military dress worn by the school's cadre officers. He thought: his mother had named him "Wang Ji" — ji (戟) means a weapon, a halberd — to defend the homeland and the nation.
What one keeps in mind will surely find its echo. In April 1990, Wang Ji, as a newly enrolled doctoral student, finally put on the military uniform he had long dreamed of. He recalled that the moment he first straightened his military cap and fastened his collar button (风纪扣), he felt, for the first time, that he was truly complete.
In Wang Ji's application for Party membership, I found this passage:
"My path of growth has been relatively smooth; I have not personally experienced the tempering of hardship and setbacks. I am resolved, under the Party's cultivation and education, to temper my will, and no matter what arduous or difficult circumstances I may face, I will absolutely never retreat (决不退缩), and will resolutely defend (坚决捍卫) the Party's cause, remain loyal to the Party, and never forget my obligations …"
When he wrote these words, Wang Ji had just turned 22. Later, when fate dealt him a devastating blow, his choices fully honored the oath he had made.
In 2015, Wang Ji returned to the teaching post he loved, while also serving as the chief technical expert for a major national security basic research project.
As chief technical expert, business travel became an unavoidable part of Wang Ji's life. So he worked out a set of "travel rules": never stay overnight if a same-day round trip is possible; never delay if the earliest flight is available.
Sometimes before dawn, Wang Ji was already on his way, pushing his wheelchair. His luggage was minimal: regular medications, a few changes of clothes, and a half-worn laptop computer. Airport staff had long grown familiar with this "wheelchair professor" — security screening, boarding, transferring to the narrow aircraft-specific wheelchair: the whole routine flowed like water.
Wang Ji used to have a goal he often voiced: to work healthily for the motherland for 50 years. Now, he tells his students: "Well, 'healthily' is a bit difficult these days — but let's change the spelling: spell it with the perseverance of a steady, long-flowing stream (细水长流的毅力), and strive to work for the motherland for 50 years."
III.
In the College of Computer Science, there is a classroom with no nameplate on the door.
This classroom is always full.
"This is Professor Wang's 'dedicated classroom,'" a companion said with a smile.
Wang Ji told me that before he began dialysis, his twice-weekly course in Formal Methods (《形式化方法》) was held in this classroom, each session lasting two to three hours.
Students cannot forget what Professor Wang looked like when he taught. With one hand braced on the wheelchair armrest for balance, he wrote furiously on the whiteboard with the other. Students below listened with rapt attention, drawn by Professor Wang into an abstract yet exquisite mathematical world.
Wang Ji has a distinctive method of teaching students, inherited from his mentor Chen Huowang: he has students use marker pens on the whiteboard for live derivations as much as possible, and rely on PowerPoint as little as possible.
I heard the following story.
On a cold winter night, the laboratory was brightly lit. A doctoral student was demonstrating an algorithm using dazzling slideshow animations, light and shadow shifting with each transition. Suddenly, Wang Ji raised his hand, signaling a pause. He wheeled his chair to the whiteboard. "The transition effects in PPT easily conceal logical gaps (逻辑的断层)," he said, picking up a marker and beginning to derive from first principles, step by step, leaving neat lines of ink across the whiteboard.
"The whiteboard is also a test for the teacher," Wang Ji said. "Teachers are not omnipotent; there are problems we cannot work out either. The places where we get stuck during a blackboard discussion are often precisely where new knowledge forms and innovative ideas break through their shell. I am not afraid of being stumped in front of students, because the places where I cannot answer are the new directions that my students and I can explore together."
In 2021, Wang Ji's condition worsened again, requiring long-term dialysis.
Three times a week, four hours each time. Others call it "treatment"; he calls it his "weekend." Looking at Wang Ji's smile, an image suddenly surfaced in my mind: Wang Ji lying on a hospital bed during dialysis, his arm connected to a transparent plastic tube through which dark-red blood flows. He holds his phone, sometimes reading cutting-edge academic papers, sometimes marking student theses. The dialysis machine hums softly beside him.
Students say that although Professor Wang is a strict teacher in academics, in daily life he is a very endearing person. "You young people — don't just focus on studying; life should also be rich and flavorful (有滋有味)." This is what he often says to his students.
In Wang Ji's mind there is a "Changsha food map." Since beginning dialysis, his diet has been strictly restricted, and many of the foods he used to love he can no longer touch. Yet he collects food rankings and recommends them to his students. Even his strictly rationed daily drinking water, he wants to make a little more interesting. To that end, Wang Ji specially purchased a sparkling water machine to infuse his daily drinking water with fine bubbles, kept chilled in the refrigerator in the office corridor. Whenever he goes to fetch water, the light, brisk rolling of his wheelchair echoes through the corridor. He sweeps through like a breeze, his face full of smiles, cheerfully greeting students coming the other way: "Hey, I'm back again!"
Student Fan Kai also told me a small story.
In May 2025, Wang Ji was named a "National Model of Self-Improvement (全国自强模范)." Classmates sent congratulations in the group chat: "Cheering for Professor Wang!" Wang Ji replied: "I should be cheering for you — you are the future."
"I have kept Professor Wang's words in my heart ever since," Fan Kai said.
Wang Ji's doctoral supervisor was Academician Chen Huowang, a towering figure in China's software engineering field. From his mentor, Wang Ji learned two things. First, a truly good teacher must not only teach, but must also dare to push students into the spotlight, letting them prove themselves on the broadest possible stage. Second, scholarship must "reach the sky and stand on the ground (顶天立地)" — standing at the academic frontier while being rooted in the nation's actual needs.
Today, he teaches his own students the same way.
IV.
Huang Chun smiles a great deal.
The first time I met her, she was standing in front of a display panel, quietly reading the text on it.
"Professor Huang Chun."
She turned at the sound, her eyes curving into a smile, giving a very warm impression.
"Many people at the school say that you and Professor Wang Ji have an intellectual romance (智性恋)."
She smiled even more happily: "Ours is a clingy romance (黏糊恋)."
Huang Chun is Wang Ji's junior schoolmate; the two met in 1990, confirmed their relationship in 1995, and registered their marriage in 1997. On the day they registered, after completing the formalities, the two walked back along Zhongshan Road, found a small restaurant by the roadside, ordered a few dishes, and called it a celebration. They held no wedding ceremony and took no wedding photos. Colleagues, teachers, friends, and unit leaders received only a bag of wedding candy.
This young couple invested all the time and energy they saved into their work. Later, Huang Chun became a key contributor to the Tianhe supercomputer, while Wang Ji broke new ground in the field of high-assurance software.
Fate is capricious, but it cannot defeat the strong.
After Wang Ji collapsed in 2013, Huang Chun shouldered all the burdens of the family alone. She still remembers the trembling in her heart when she signed the surgical consent form for her husband's bilateral leg amputation. At that time, caring for Wang Ji in his hospital bed became her primary task.
Speaking of those past events, Huang Chun still smiled. She said: "Actually, it wasn't as hard as you might imagine. When a problem comes, you face it directly and solve it. It's like writing software — once the architecture is in place, you keep refining it; when a bug appears, you fix it."
Huang Chun said she is grateful to everyone who helped them — the college, the university, the community, the organization … she named them one by one, her eyes reddening.
In 2021, Wang Ji needed to go to Nanjing for treatment due to kidney failure. At the same time, Huang Chun received an important assignment — to go to Tianjin to participate in the development effort for the next-generation Tianhe supercomputer.
Neither could wait; neither could be delayed. After discussing it with Wang Ji, Huang Chun made a decision. She arranged a six-month leave of absence from school for their fifth-grade daughter and brought the child to Tianjin.
Two cities, one south and one north; a family of three, each in a different place.
Speaking of this, Huang Chun smiled and said: "We have a great tacit understanding, we support each other fully, and we trust the organization."
In 2024, the "Tianhe" E-class computer key technology verification system in which Huang Chun participated achieved two world-first rankings in international standings.
Their daughter grew up in such a family. In her memory, her father sits in a wheelchair — yet he is very tall.
Wang Ji said he has many small goals: for instance, to crack a particular technical difficulty, or to finish revising a few papers. He also has big goals — some he can speak of, some he cannot. But his greatest wish is to live to see his daughter's wedding day.
He said this with his characteristic smile. Whether it was my imagination or not, I saw his eyes shining with a bright, glistening light.
V.
Today, across the NUDT campus, one sees hurrying figures everywhere. Their steps are quick, their gazes resolute, heading toward laboratories, toward classrooms, toward places full of hope. Among them is one figure pushing a wheelchair, body leaning slightly forward, arm muscles faintly swelling with the effort. The small cloth bag hanging from the wheelchair sways gently with its owner's movements.
The wheelchair creaks and turns, carrying him — on a faith that will never be broken (永不折戟) — to soar freely through the vast starry river of forging swords for the nation (为国铸剑). Where the heart points, no distance is too far — this is Wang Ji's world.
Layout design: Wang Feng