An 800-Year-Old Idea Walks Into the AI Debate: Keep Your Judgement Sovereign

The sharpest line about AI this month was written in the 12th century.

At the Fifth Kaoting Forum in Nanping, Fujian — formally the Conference on Zhu Xi Studies and Dialogue Among Diverse Civilizations, held 17 to 18 October 2026 — Professor Fang Xudong of East China Normal University drew a distinction that cuts through most current argument. Using AI is not the problem. Giving up your judgement to it is. Information verified through 22 October 2026.

Tech Times, reporting the forum on 20 October, summarised Fang’s position in his own terms: “Using AI is not rényù. Surrendering all power of judgment to the algorithm is rényù“.

One word is doing the work there.

Appetite, principle, and the will that is supposed to govern both

Zhu Xi (1130–1200) was the Song Dynasty philosopher who completed Neo-Confucianism as a moral, ethical and metaphysical synthesis, drawing on Zhou Dunyi and the Cheng brothers, Tech Times explained. His commentaries on the Four Books became the curriculum for China’s imperial civil service examinations from 1313 to 1905, and the system spread across Korea, Japan and Vietnam.

Within that system, Fang’s argument turns on two terms. Tiānlǐ is heavenly principle, the moral order. Rényù is appetite — disordered when it stops being governed. Between them sits the will, zhǐ, whose job is to stay sovereign.

Tech Times put Fang’s version this way: the moral task was to ensure the controlling faculty of will remained sovereign over appetite and did not surrender judgment to convenience. Setting an air-conditioner to 16.5°C when 26°C is adequate and ecologically responsible is, in this framework, appetite overriding principle. Small stakes. Same failure shape as the large ones.

Scale it up and the shape is familiar: a professional deferring to a model output they could have checked, a student submitting reasoning they never performed. Fang’s claim is that setting an AI system to make decisions the user could and should make independently is precisely this kind of surrender — not a technological mistake but a moral one.

It refuses “never use it.” It also refuses “the tool made me do it.” Responsibility stays with the person, exactly where convenience wants it not to.

What the Nanping sub-forum discussed

Fang’s panel was one piece of a larger programme. The third sub-forum, held in Nanping on 17 October, was centred on “Zhu Xi’s Philosophy and Humanistic Care in the Digital-Intelligent Era”, organised by the Fujian Federation of Social Sciences and the Nanping Federation of Social Sciences. It brought together scholars from institutions including Renmin University of China, Beijing Normal University, Zhejiang University, Xiamen University, the University of Hong Kong and Liaoning University.

12 experts shared research at that sub-forum, the release said. The questions are practical, not decorative: how Zhu Xi’s philosophy can inform education in the age of AI, and what gewu zhizhi — the extension of knowledge through the investigation of things — means for humanistic care now, alongside value formation in large AI models.

Three other sub-forums ran alongside it, on the “Two Integrations,” Chinese wisdom for global governance, and Zhu Xi cultural heritage and cross-strait development. Tech Times reported the wider forum drew nearly 200 scholars from more than 50 countries, with a field visit on 19 October to Kaoting Village, where Zhu Xi established his final academy in 1192 and died in 1200.

One principle, many forms — and an argument about civilisations

The AI panel was not the forum’s only contemporary claim. A governance panel centred on Chen Lai of Tsinghua University engaging Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis, the 1993 argument that post-Cold War conflict would follow civilizational fault lines. Chen argued, in Tech Times’ account, that Huntington had extended a framework shaped by Western-Islamic tensions into a universal theory, and that evidence had undermined it.

Against it, Chen invoked Zhu Xi’s lǐ yī fēn shū — “one principle, many manifestations,” the claim that a single universal ordering principle underlies diverse forms of its expression. In diplomatic translation, Tech Times said, that offers universal values that manifest differently across cultures: an alternative to projecting one cultural model on everyone, and to denying any shared ground.

That use is political as well as philosophical. Tech Times noted the forum was co-hosted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the International Confucian Association and the Fujian Provincial Government, within China’s Global Civilization Initiative, proposed in March 2023. Hold both facts at once: the scholarship is internationally credentialed, and the platform hosting it has a state purpose. Neither cancels the other.

Tech Times pointed to a 2023 Hong Kong Baptist University conference on ethical and social issues in AI, which produced a 2024 Springer volume examining Confucian and comparative AI ethics. His contribution extends that conversation by naming a specific mechanism — rényù against a sovereign zhǐ — instead of appealing vaguely to traditional values.

Analysis: The strength of Fang’s formulation is that it locates the AI problem where regulation barely touches: not the model, not the data, but the moment a person decides to stop deciding. Most AI ethics talk asks what systems should be allowed to do. This asks what users should refuse to stop doing. You cannot comply by purchasing a better tool. You comply minute by minute, or not at all. Its weakness is the mirror image. A philosophy of personal sovereignty gives institutions little to enforce, and it can be used to blame individuals for surrenders that surrounding incentives were designed to produce. The Nanping reporting does not resolve that tension. It may be the most useful thing about it.

The test Fang proposed travels home with you. Next time the answer arrives before you have thought, ask which faculty is in charge.

Sources

1. Tech Times — “Zhu Xi’s 800-Year-Old Philosophy Just Became China’s Answer in AI Ethics Debate” (20 October 2026): https://www.techtimes.com/articles/329280/20261020/zhu-xis-800-year-old-philosophy-just-became-chinas-answer-ai-ethics-debate.htm
2. WDPP / TimesNewswire — “Zhu Xi’s Philosophy in the Digital-Intelligent Era: Scholars from China and Abroad Explore New Approaches to Humanistic Care” (18 October 2026): https://www.wdpp.org/press-release/zhu-xis-philosophy-in-the-digital-intelligent-era-scholars-from-china-and-abroad-explore-new-approaches-to-humanistic-care-145443/
3. FinancialContent / MarketersMedia — “Zhu Xi’s Philosophy in the Digital-Intelligent Era: Scholars from China and Abroad Explore New Approaches to Humanistic Care” (18 October 2026): https://www.financialcontent.com/article/marketersmedia-2026-10-18-zhu-xis-philosophy-in-the-digital-intelligent-era-scholars-from-china-and-abroad-explore-new-approaches-to-humanistic-care