Jiahao Shen and the Inner Freedom Today’s Systems Can’t Erase

In every era, there are people who refuse to let the world define their conscience. In third-century China, two such figures — Ruan Ji and Ji Kang — withdrew from a collapsing political order to protect the last space the state could not touch: the mind. They did not raise armies or stage rebellions. They simply refused to surrender the one freedom that corruption could not buy.

Today, Jiahao Shen, an independent history researcher in Postgraduate program of World History and Philosophy at King’s College London, argues that their struggle is no longer historical. It is ours.

When institutions speak the language of virtue but practice its opposite

Ruan Ji experienced the moral deterioration of his age firsthand. The formal rituals and ethical vocabulary of the declining Han order survived, but only as performance. The more the state spoke of virtue, the less room it left for sincerity. The ideals that once grounded society had been converted into tools of legitimacy — an early warning, Shen suggests, that once moral truth is codified into system, it becomes vulnerable to politicization.

Ruan Ji’s response was not violence but clarity. He turned away from an external order that no longer reflected reality and sought coherence within himself. His melancholy, Shen insists, was not defeat. It was the painful realization that awareness itself had become incompatible with public life.

Ji Kang reached a similar conclusion through reason rather than sorrow. He believed that goodness cannot be mandated, and that moral action compelled by authority is already corrupted. When the new rulers demanded his service, he declined; when they executed him, he died without fear. For Shen, this was not martyrdom but integrity — the refusal to let fear dictate truth.

A warning from history: imitation without conviction

After their deaths, later elites adopted the aesthetics of the Bamboo Grove — its detachment, its elegance, its performative sorrow — but drained it of spirit. What had begun as moral resistance was reduced to cultural fashion. Shen calls this one of history’s most predictable tragedies: every system eventually learns to imitate the dissent it once suppressed. Form survives; conscience does not.

This tendency, he warns, is even more pronounced today.

The global machinery of participation

Modern life no longer resembles the courts of the Wei–Jin period, but the mechanism of conformity is strikingly familiar. Today’s systems — corporate, bureaucratic, digital — perfect control by making obedience feel voluntary. They ask for engagement, not submission. They promise empowerment while gradually disciplining the inner life.

Shen argues that this new form of governance is more pervasive than any ancient empire. It operates through metrics, visibility, and constant self-presentation. It no longer needs to coerce; it simply absorbs.

And because participation appears to be a choice, resistance becomes harder to even name.

In this environment, sincerity becomes a liability. Reflection becomes inefficient. The result is what Shen calls a civilisation of fatigue — outwardly dynamic, inwardly depleted.

The painful mind: the awareness that refuses to die

Against this, Shen revives the inner strategy of Ruan Ji and Ji Kang. The mind, he argues, is the last space not yet fully colonized by systems. But it must be defended deliberately.

He calls this project the idealised inner world — not a retreat from reality, but a conscious refusal to let institutions decide the limits of thought. This space is built through imagination, strengthened through solitude, and sustained through the courage to remain sensitive in a world that rewards numbness.

Pain, in this framework, is not a flaw. It is the cost of refusing to surrender.

“To feel pain,” Shen writes, “is to know that the self has not yet adapted to falsehood.”

The painful mind becomes, in effect, the conscience of modern civilisation.

A universal conflict beneath a global veneer

Although Shen’s essay grows out of a Chinese historical tradition, the conflict he describes is unmistakably global. Every modern society, regardless of culture or ideology, now relies on forms of participation that blur the line between expression and compliance. What differs are only the slogans.

The deeper structure — the quiet pressure to perform, to adapt, to optimize — is universal.

In this way, Shen argues, the legacy of Ruan Ji and Ji Kang belongs to anyone trying to remain human in an age of systems. Their story is not about ancient China but about the recurring confrontation between conscience and conformity.

Jiahao Shen’s own struggle

For Shen, this is not an abstract inquiry. His education across continents — from Asia to the United States to the United Kingdom, and his current life in Japan — has shown him that modern systems, though culturally distinct, operate with extraordinary similarity. Everywhere, institutions speak the language of opportunity while quietly narrowing the space for interior life.

Writing becomes his way of holding onto that space. His study of the Wei–Jin sages is also an act of self-preservation — a refusal to let the external world decide the terms of his intellectual and moral existence.

Like the thinkers he studies, Shen lives within systems he cannot fully change. But he insists they cannot fully change him either.

What remains unconquered

The lesson Shen draws from Ruan Ji and Ji Kang is not despair but responsibility. External systems may continue to expand; they may grow more sophisticated, more persuasive, more “human-centered” in language. But none of them can fully capture the private conscience that refuses imitation.

In an age that measures everything, the inner world becomes the only thing left that cannot be quantified.

The painful mind — the mind that still feels contradiction, that still recognizes hypocrisy, that still suffers from awareness — is not a weakness. It is the last evidence of freedom.

And as long as even one person preserves it, Shen argues, the spirit that once survived in the Bamboo Grove survives still.