Follow These 5 Unique Numbers to Understand Wang Ji's "Life in Numbers"

Wang Ji's "Life in Numbers"

■ PLA Daily Reporter Chu Yanan

Recently, the deeds of "Model of the Era" (时代楷模) Wang Ji have been widely celebrated after media coverage. Fate has struck him blow after heavy blow, testing Wang Ji again and again. The hardships that did not knock him down have all become steps in his life, lifting up an ever more upright soul. Looking back on this road strewn with hardship, a set of numbers inscribes the ordeals he has endured and opens a window through which we can understand him. In this issue, let us follow these 5 unique numbers to understand Wang Ji.

—The Editors

**A Life-and-Death Struggle in the ICU**

**147 days** — for an ordinary person, nearly five months of passing time; for Wang Ji, more than 210,000 minutes of thick, viscous stagnation.

In the intensive care unit, he was jolted awake by a smothering pain. A dull, heavy ache seeped out from between his bones, washing over his entire body wave by wave. The monitor beside him beeped on, day and night.

The first abnormality he noticed was that his body felt lighter — the outline beneath the blanket was missing a piece. He reached his hand under the covers and slowly felt downward; where his thighs should have been, he found only gauze and bedsheets.

On January 23, 2013, Wang Ji suffered a sudden aortic dissection. From his chest to the base of his legs, the walls of his blood vessels were torn open. Surgery followed upon surgery:

January 24: aortic replacement.

January 25: decompressive fasciotomy of the left lower leg.

February 1: bilateral lower-limb amputation.

March 11: re-amputation of the right lower limb.

April 10, 17, 26: debridement, debridement, debridement…

By the end, no one could keep count. All anyone knew was one cruel fact: the soldier lying before them would never be able to stand again.

For nearly half his life, Wang Ji had always been on his feet as he pressed forward in scientific research. He stood in formation, stood at the lectern, stood at the front lines of research.

But now he sank into the white bedding of a hospital bed, a body with no point of support. He instinctively tried to bring his heels together, but he could no longer hold the crisp military posture.

The IV needles in his hands were changed again and again, puncture hole upon puncture hole.

He had always been a man who chased time; now time had become the heaviest shackle.

The monitor's beeping struck his eardrums one beat at a time, like a clock with no end. He tried counting the sounds to fall asleep, but when he opened his eyes, only a few minutes had passed.

Wang Ji's eyes suddenly reddened. He said nothing, only let out a soft sigh.

As the days of lucidity grew longer, he first asked for his students' theses to revise, then picked up medical books — asking about drug names, about indicators, about every detail of post-operative recovery. He had spent his whole life solving scientific problems; this time, he wanted to solve the problem of his own body.

Wang Ji still wanted to stand up.

He made a special trip to a hospital in Beijing to be fitted with prosthetics, and gripped the parallel bars in the rehabilitation room, moving forward one step at a time. When he could actually walk a few steps, he had someone record a video and sent it to his family, friends, and doctors.

He said nothing special in those days, but everyone could feel it — Wang Ji's heart had brightened. For a time, the hope of seeing Wang Ji stand again became everyone's wish.

But the prosthetics were too heavy. After a few steps, beads of sweat would seep through Wang Ji's shirt at the waist. A single lap of less than 300 meters took him a full hour to walk, and he walked at least three laps every day. The medical staff said: "We've never seen a patient push himself this hard."

In the end, Wang Ji took off the prosthetics and told those around him: "The same amount of effort, spent on research, can accomplish more."

Having truly tried to stand up, he could sit down in peace. This was not a light-hearted "reconciliation with fate" — it was a man who had charged forward for half a lifetime, precisely calculating his own life equation: spend limited energy where it is most worth holding the line.

**A Soldier's Battle Station**

How large is **0.2 square meters**?

Three A4 sheets of paper laid side by side — nearly enough to cover the seat cushion of Wang Ji's wheelchair. At the center of the cushion is a sunken depression that can no longer spring back.

Wang Ji's elbows, pressed year after year against the edges of the wheelchair armrests, have cracked and curled the black leather, wearing a pale groove half a finger's width wide — like an invisible boundary line.

Within that line is his battle station (战位). To reach the theses and books beside him, he must lean forward and extend his arm, calculating the angle and distance.

Beyond that line is the laboratory he once knew so well. He used to move with swift strides, bounding up steps in two or three paces; even after pulling several all-nighters in a row, his step was still light. He had always harbored a driving ambition: to build China's own high-assurance software (高可信软件).

What is "high-assurance"?

"Reliable" (可靠) is not enough — it must be "trustworthy" (可信), and more precisely, "highly trustworthy" (高可信).

Software, like a person, can fall "ill." A single erroneous instruction can cause a warship to lose power in heavy seas; a single system defect can cause space tracking and control to lose its target at a critical moment. In informatized warfare (信息化战争), a software failure is a catastrophe. Wang Ji is the "software physician" of this field.

While the outside world chased waves of computing power and hardware iteration, he remained, decade after decade, on the "niche and hardcore" (冷门硬核) track of high-assurance software technology. The "diagnostic instruments" in his hands are a software toolset he forged at the cost of his full mental and physical resources. This toolset treats not only common ailments but also the tiny lesions buried deep within code.

At the end of the last century, research on high-assurance software technology in China was almost entirely a blank. It was Academician Chen Huowang, Wang Ji's doctoral supervisor, and Wang Ji himself who first proposed the concept. Wang Ji later opened the first related courses at the National University of Defense Technology (国防科大). He wrote the textbooks; he set the standards. In those days, his battlefield seemed to stretch without limit.

During an interview, he smiled, glanced down at himself, and told the reporter: "Here I am, trapped by a wheelchair."

Was he truly trapped?

After more than a year of rehabilitation, Wang Ji, smiling, wheeled himself back to campus. Not long after his return, he took the lead in applying for a certain national defense 973 project.

This is a strategic high ground in major basic research for national security — the equivalent of the nation's "scientific prospecting team," drilling into the theoretical bedrock of disciplines to lay the foundation and chart the path for the technological breakthroughs of the next generation of defense equipment.

At the time, across the entire military's software technology field, there was only one such project. Who led it would directly determine how deep and how solid that foundation could be.

When word spread that Wang Ji had taken on this responsibility, everyone worried on his behalf: a man who still had long scars across his chest and abdomen, who was still practicing how to sit steadily in a wheelchair — could he bear pressure of this magnitude? The lead expert (首席专家) not only had to control the technical direction but also coordinate across units, conduct frontline investigations, and attend countless review and evaluation meetings. Could he withstand that intensity?

Those who heard him present for the first time always let their gaze fall first on the wheelchair — the military uniform crisp, the trouser legs folded neatly on the seat cushion. But once he began dissecting the technical plan and pinpointing the path forward, within a few sentences all the doubts that had hovered over the wheelchair drifted away, carried off by his line of thinking.

During the six years of intensive project work, his schedule was fuller than it had been before he fell ill.

In the conference room he would sit for seven or eight hours at a stretch, a cup of water often placed in front of him — but from the opening to the close of the meeting, the rim of the cup was never touched. From the conference room to the restroom, the wheelchair had to make four turns and pass through two doors. He did not want anyone to stop what they were doing to accompany him on that trip.

Over those six years, he traveled on assignment more than 70 times. Review meetings, milestone evaluations, acceptance defenses — every occasion that required the lead expert's presence, he missed not one. One winter, he flew alone to Beijing for a meeting. Participants who did not know him watched him wheel himself in, their eyes sweeping to the empty trouser legs, and audibly caught their breath.

No one ever heard him complain. When team members urged him to rest, he would reply mildly: "I want to see if I've still got it."

In 2021, the project passed its acceptance review. The review conclusion, in black and white, read: overall technical level at the international forefront and domestically leading, with some indicators internationally leading.

That day, a smile spread across his face — the same quiet expression as always. The untouched water cup and the acceptance report pinned under the corner of the table rested in the warm sunlight, as if keeping a silent promise.

**Days Cut Apart by Dialysis**

In the final year of the intensive acceptance process for the national defense 973 project, a thin slip of a diagnostic report once again cast a shadow over Wang Ji's life — uremia.

Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday: dialysis three times a week.

Cold numbers forced their way into his tightly packed research rhythm, completely rewriting every ordering of his time.

In the past, so as not to trouble others or interrupt the pace of his research, he had gone entire meetings without touching a drop of water. Now, medical orders strictly limited his daily fluid intake to no more than 500 milliliters.

Drinking and eating had to be measured and calculated with precision. The most ordinary desires of ordinary people were, for him, laden with prohibition.

Without continuous, uninterrupted blocks of time for research and teaching, his entire schedule had to be arranged around dialysis sessions. After each treatment, exhaustion arrived on schedule; he could only steal time inch by inch in the gaps between physical and mental depletion.

On dialysis days, Wang Ji would expertly wheel himself to the bedside, use his upper body strength to support himself, steadily shift his body onto the bed, then lie quietly, pull the thin blanket over himself, and wait for treatment.

The scattered pale-purple bruises on his arms, and a brownish old scar nearly 10 centimeters long, are the marks left by years of repeated needle punctures. The instant the needle pierced his skin, his brow would furrow slightly, then smooth out. Pain had long since become routine.

The light from the ward ceiling fell in even, clean squares; outside the window, the Liuyang River flowed slowly, and Hongshan Bridge stood still above the water. The machine hummed softly; blood circulated through the tubing with a steady gurgle.

The hours of dialysis that others would regard as torment were, for Wang Ji, the most tranquil moments of solitude in his ordinary days. The unresolved bottlenecks in ongoing projects, the road ahead for his discipline, the cruxes in students' theses — all of these took shape and became clear in the steady rhythm of circulation.

Most of the time, he is a teacher, a problem-solver, a pathfinder. Yet when the dialysis machine's rhythmic beeping begins, the identity he works so hard to conceal surfaces naturally — he is a patient who must live with illness for the rest of his life.

Perhaps the outside world assumes he is gritting his teeth and enduring, suffering through it all. But for Wang Ji, the words "forcing through" (硬撑) have never existed.

Fate has compressed his radius of life again and again; the boundaries of his body have been layered over with numbers. Yet his loyalty to serving the nation, his original aspiration in scholarship, and his perseverance in inquiry have not contracted by a single fraction.

When clean blood flows back into his limbs, Wang Ji's world is once again filled with one research project after another, leaving those in the ward with the image of a figure always hurrying onward.

**The Whiteboard, Erased and Written Again**

On the coordinate system of Wang Ji's life, "43" is two overlapping marks.

One marks the years: this year is the 43rd year since he first walked through the gates of the National University of Defense Technology.

One marks the passing of the torch (薪火): after returning from grave illness, he personally supervised **43** master's and doctoral students.

When doctoral student Li Minglong first became Wang Ji's student, his most immediate impression of his supervisor was strictness. Wang Ji rarely used slides when guiding students; instead, he had them work through derivations on a whiteboard with a marker. Every time Li Minglong stood at the whiteboard, he was tense, because behind him his supervisor was watching every line of every formula, and the slightest lapse in logic would bring an immediate halt.

Liu Wanwei — once a student, now a colleague — spent more than 20 years at the whiteboard alongside Wang Ji. In 2005, just after beginning his doctoral studies, he summoned the courage to propose that he wanted to try improving a certain classical algorithm. Wang Ji was silent for a moment, then said: "This is not an easy road. If you make up your mind to do it, I'll walk it with you."

That "walking together" lasted four years. Countless late nights, under the fluorescent lights of the conference room, it was often just the two of them — teacher and student — working through the whiteboard. The most difficult step they pondered over and over, deriving it for eight or nine months without making the slightest headway. Liu Wanwei even thought about giving up. Wang Ji, unhurried, picked up a book and handed it to him: "Take a look at this. Maybe it will give you some inspiration."

Wang Ji said that this was how he himself had come through it, and that his own supervisor had guided him the same way.

While Wang Ji was hospitalized, his students took turns keeping watch outside the ward. Late one night, Liu Wanwei opened the care log and saw that the previous attendant had written, in neat, careful characters: "Professor Wang, a peaceful night tonight."

When this moment came up during the interview, a single tear caught in the crease at the corner of Liu Wanwei's eye, slow to fall. He wiped the corner of his eye with the back of his hand and said: "Back then, all we hoped for was that the professor would be safe."

All the students assumed that once he had crossed that threshold, their supervisor would slow down. But Wang Ji, returning to the whiteboard, only tightened his pace: he gathered students at the whiteboard for derivations more frequently than before; in the gaps between dialysis sessions, he would always clutch a corrected thesis and go over the details with students.

Thirteen years have passed. Liu Wanwei has become a faculty member himself, and has gradually come to understand the deepening urgency in his supervisor.

The road of high-assurance software is "cold, hard, and slow" (冷、难、慢); it must be walked by one generation passing the baton to the next. Wang Ji understands his own physical condition clearly. He only hopes that his students will grip the baton a little more tightly.

That urgency is a responsibility inscribed in the lineage of mentorship (师承). The whiteboard Wang Ji uses most often is the very one passed down to him from his supervisor, Academician Chen Huowang — in those years, the Galaxy (银河) team pressed forward through hardship with nothing but a whiteboard and a pen.

The whiteboard is erased and written again; class after class of students comes and goes; and that foundational spirit is passed on along with them.

The young people who once stood nervously at the whiteboard, marker in hand, have mostly become pillars of the field. Some have stayed at the university to teach, fighting shoulder to shoulder with Wang Ji; others have gone to the front lines, carrying this approach to scholarship to more distant places.

**One Family, Three Separate Paths**

Thirteen years have passed since Wang Ji's grave illness. Broken apart, this number also captures the shape of this family: one family, divided into three separate paths (兵分三路).

Over those 13 years, a family has traveled a long road around a single wheelchair.

The first to grip the wheelchair's handle was Wang Ji's mother, Liu Guizhi.

She has been a strong-willed woman her whole life. She was a university student in the 1960s and later became a technical backbone at a factory. In her later years, however, her days revolved around two wheelchairs: in 2008, her husband Wang Xin fell ill and became paralyzed, and the first wheelchair entered the home; five years later, her son Wang Ji came back from the edge of death, and a second wheelchair was placed alongside the first.

When her son went out on assignment, she would go downstairs with him, slowly pushing the wheelchair by its handle. The wheels rolled softly over the ground; she fixed her gaze on the hunched figure before her, and tears flowed without a sound.

Wang Ji did not turn around. He only paused for a moment and said gently: "Mom, don't be like this. I always have to face this. My life is full and rich — isn't that a good thing?"

She wiped her tears and kept pushing the wheelchair forward.

The wheels rolled over the concrete, rolled through a mother's twilight years, and rolled into a child's childhood.

In first grade, Wang Ji's daughter wrote an essay full of imaginative ideas: "A Wheelchair That Can Walk." Give Dad's wheelchair two feet; embed a magnet between the wheels and the seat; when it needs to climb stairs, the magnet clicks into place, the wheels become "feet," and Dad won't need to trouble anyone.

In fifth grade, Dad went to Nanjing for uremia treatment, and Mom went to Tianjin to tackle an important research project. With no one to look after her, she had to take a leave from school and became Mom's "little shadow," learning to hand over wrenches and stick on labels, making the exhausted adults laugh. No one supervised her homework; no one chased after her to help her catch up on lessons. She only watched the upright figure of her father in his wheelchair, learned from her mother's unflappable composure, and followed along forward in a hazy, half-understanding way. As a small child, when she saw her parents' medals, she always burned with the desire to surpass them. Now she only wants to grow up quickly, so she can grip the wheelchair handle steadily and push a little further in her mother's place.

For all 13 years, the one who has steadily pushed this wheelchair forward is Wang Ji's wife, Huang Chun.

She is wrapped in a quiet quality — it is hard to say whether it is the equanimity worn smooth by years, or the restraint of someone exhausted to the very limit. As she speaks, she unconsciously pinches the bridge of her nose, again and again at the same spot, until it turns red.

Huang Chun's days are a series of multiple-choice questions with no standard answer.

Send her husband to work first, or send her daughter to school first? Choose the former, and the child is late; choose the latter, and her husband misses a hot breakfast.

Take her daughter to Tianjin, or stay behind? A major project was at a critical stage — she was the chief designer and had to be there; but bringing the child along would disrupt the child's schooling.

Both sides pull at her; neither can be let go.

She always says: "Every position must have someone holding it." But what she holds is far more than one position.

Over those 13 years, not one of her identities has allowed her to simply "leave her post" (离岗). Every multiple-choice question had to be weighed and weighed again on both sides of the scale. She said only two things: "There was only this choice" and "Nothing can be perfect in every way" — her tone as light as a thin mist.

As she said these things, the hand pinching her nose did not stop; her fingertips pressed harder and harder, her knuckles quietly exerting force, the red mark spreading from the bridge of her nose to the corners of her eyes. Those words were so heavy, lodged in her throat, as if they would spill out the moment she opened her mouth: "I am truly so tired."

She is just an ordinary person too. There are moments when she wants to shed every identity and go back to being a woman who can lean on her husband's shoulder. Then she would not have to feign strength in the face of a critical-condition notice, would not have to weigh her loved one's treatment against her daughter's schooling again and again.

If she truly stopped to rest for a while, who could bear to reproach her even half a word? Who could bear to urge her forward even half a step?

But she did not stop. She only pinched the bridge of her nose, one press after another, using that sharp, physical pain to press back down — bit by bit — the surging emotions, the weakness that had risen to her lips.

Wang Ji understands all of it.

Precisely because he understands, he refuses to stop. He knows that every fraction more he can do for himself lightens his wife's burden by a fraction; every step he takes forward lowers by a measure the anxiety she carries.

When the pain in his residual limbs becomes unbearable, he will dial his wife's number. When she picks up, he says nothing — just a few seconds of silence. His wife understands everything; Wang Ji knows she understands everything.

After hanging up, Huang Chun looks out the window at the rain and says quietly: "Wang Ji's residual limbs must be hurting again."

Layout design: Wang Feng

Photography: Luan Cheng