Jiahao Shen and the Unyielding Spirit of the Painful Mind of Ruan Ji and Ji Kang
In the chaos of third-century China, as the Wei–Jin dynasties fractured, two poets refused to compromise their integrity. Ruan Ji and Ji Kang, members of the celebrated Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, withdrew from a world ruled by corruption and fear. Ruan Ji poured anguish into poetry that still trembles with longing; Ji Kang met execution with calm defiance. Their lives became a quiet rebellion against the moral decay of their age.
Seventeen centuries later, their struggle has found an unexpected echo in the work of Jiahao Shen, an independent history researcher from the postgraduate program of World History and Philosophy at King’s College London. Shen, who previously studied History and Asian Studies at James Madison University and completed a Master of Higher Education at the University of Oklahoma, sees in these ancient thinkers not distant subjects but spiritual allies. Their world of collapsing authority, he believes, is mirrored in today’s polished systems of control.
Shen’s idea of the “painful mind” lies at the heart of his interpretation. For him, it describes the state of awareness that emerges when conscience survives within structures that deny it. In Ruan Ji’s sorrow he sees the cost of remaining pure in a false world; in Ji Kang’s courage, the proof that moral freedom may persist even in defeat. Both, he argues, demonstrate how inner truth can outlast external power.
The relevance of their experience, Shen suggests, extends to the present. He views the modern full-time job system as a subtler but no less complete form of coercion — an economic order that reaches into the soul. It organises time, defines worth, and disciplines thought. In its pursuit of endless productivity, he sees the erosion of reflection, sincerity and moral autonomy. What empire once demanded through decree, modernity achieves through routine.
Against this backdrop, Shen’s engagement with Ruan Ji and Ji Kang becomes a form of resistance. His essay, “Ruan Ji and Ji Kang — The Painful Mind and the Internalization of the Idealized World,” is both scholarship and confession: an effort to describe how the individual might remain whole inside a system that fragments the self. The “idealised world” he writes of is not fantasy but a moral necessity — the space within the mind where integrity can still survive.
In his own life, Shen experiences that struggle daily. Each demand of efficiency or compliance, he feels, is a test of whether thought can remain free. Writing has become his chosen act of preservation — a way to keep the inner world intact when the outer one insists on obedience. Through the discipline of reflection, he reconstructs the sanctuary that Ruan Ji and Ji Kang once built through poetry and philosophy.
For Shen, pain is not a condition to escape but a measure of consciousness. The painful mind is what remains when sensitivity outlives convenience — when a person continues to feel in a world that prefers indifference. It is both burden and proof: a reminder that the spirit has not yet gone numb. In embracing it, Shen finds continuity with those earlier scholars who lived and died for the same conviction.
His education and research have made that conviction global in scope. By linking the intellectual crisis of medieval China with the quiet despair of modern professional life, Shen argues for a broader understanding of freedom — one that begins not in rebellion but in self-possession. To remain sincere, he suggests, is itself a political act.
Through the lens of Ruan Ji and Ji Kang, Jiahao Shen re-examines what it means to live ethically in an age of conformity. The centuries separating them dissolve into a single question: how does one keep faith with truth when every system rewards obedience? His answer is austere but hopeful — that freedom endures wherever the mind still dares to protect its inner world.
