A Chinese peasant's courtyard is not the place you'd expect to find a hotbed of ingenuity and ambition, held together with coils of old wire and rusting batteries, writes Fintan O'Toole in Beijing
Wu Yulu's hands and arms have the deep brown pigment of a typical Chinese farmer, but if you look closely at his left hand you can see that it is mottled with white patches of scarred skin. Five years ago, when he was connecting a fuse to a second-hand battery, there was an explosion. He was badly burned on his arms and body and needed several weeks of hospital treatment. The scars he still bears are the marks of a wonderful obsession.
You don't have to be especially observant to realise, from the moment you enter the narrow door into the courtyard of his low redbrick house in the village of Mawu in Tongzhou, 60km south of Beijing, that Wu Yulu is not a typical peasant. The centre of the courtyard is a shaded area with a galvanised roof, and like many Chinese village homes, it has a pool table resting under a small tree. But the cues and balls have long since been lost and the scuffed baize is loaded with fuses, coils of old wire, rusting batteries, dusty plastic remote controllers and unidentifiable bits of scrap metal. The rough sheds on three sides of the courtyard seem full of the same kind of junk.
In the extreme left-hand corner of the yard, another galvanised sheet covers a small enclave that is otherwise open. Inside is a child-sized wooden chair festooned with more bits of flex, some more stray bits of mechanical detritus hanging forlornly from a hook, and one of the oddest things you will ever see in a Chinese village: a gleaming, five and a half foot tall robot. It has a square head, with a yellow mouth that speaks to warn any traffic it might encounter on the road that it cannot turn left or right. Over its little roundy eyes, two black eyebrows arch in evident surprise at finding themselves on a 1920s futuristic machine loitering in a 21st century Chinese village. Rather ignominiously for a creature with a magnificent pedigree in modern fantasies of the future, the robot's arms are attached to a rickshaw. Along with a smaller version that can carry a child, this robot has the task of parading his creator along the dusty track to the centre of the village.
You can see things that look like Mr Wu's robots at science fairs around the world, but the apparent similarity is deceptive. Other people's robots are designed by scientists and operated by computers. They are born from long traditions of mathematics, mechanical and electrical engineering, and made with sophisticated tools and processes. Mr Wu's are born from his own head. He left school at 14 to fulfil his allotted destiny and work the land, received no technical training and didn't travel even as far as Beijing until he was 30. He knows almost no mathematics, can't do technical drawings and has never used a computer. He has no capital to invest, no tools more sophisticated than a simple lathe, and no access to materials other than what he can scavenge in the local area.
YET WU YULU started to think about making robots when he was 10. Now 45, he has been creating a succession of ever-more sophisticated machines for a quarter of a century now. The robots are witty, playful, wonderfully inventive. As well as the rickshaw robots, there's a "monkey" with magnetised feet who runs up metallic walls, a little hopping "frog", a huge eight-legged metal trestle table that strides along the ground and carries two people on its back and a sweet little guy who can pick flowers from a vase and offer them to a visitor. His masterpiece, which was bought last year by the Chinese Academy of Science and is being studied by its experts, can drink, smoke and draw pictures.
The machines have more to do with art than with science, with childlike delight than with cold technical mastery. But they are not entirely innocent, for they raise some basic questions about invention in a conventional society. Wu Yulu's instinctive genius may be a testament to the great inventiveness of a Chinese culture that led the world for thousands of years, but it is also a reminder that creators are seldom conformists.
Had he been born a decade earlier, life for Wu Yulu might have been harder than it has been. Standing out from the crowd was not a great idea during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but Wu seems the kind of man who would have found it impossible to till the fields, keep his head down and blend in with everybody else. Sitting with him in the cool, dark interior of his house, on a chair from which a circuit board and a coil of wire have been hastily cleared, he seems quiet, matter-of-fact but slightly removed from everything around him. His long-suffering wife Dong Shuyan watches him from the far side of the room with the kind of weary indulgence you see in a woman married to a man with a long-term illness.
He wooed her with a machine. Watching her make clothes in the summer heat, he disappeared and re-merged after two days with a mechanical fan he had concocted from bamboo and an old battery. Over time, his knack became less charming. He accidentally burned down the house while trying to make a robot. He has no interest in working the fields, and rents out his family's land to another farmer. He has spent far more money on making robots than he has ever earned from them. Dong Shuyan has kept the family going over the years by running a small kindergarten.
Yet she recognises, as he does himself, that her husband was born with a gift that is as hard to ignore as it is to understand.
"People ask me why or how I do it, and I have to say that I can't answer the question," Wu Yulu says. "It's like a sixth sense. I have some kind of instinct for making machines move. I always wanted to do it, but I couldn't say why."
From the outside, however, that instinct is no great puzzle. Chinese peasants such as Wu have for countless centuries been born to work, to bend their backs, grow food, be obedient and die. The dream of the robot is the dream of having someone else to do the work for you. With a robot, a peasant could be like an emperor. The form may be modern, but the dream is surely as old as the fields.
I WENT TO the Experimental Middle School in the new suburb of Wangjing in northern Beijing to meet the teacher Cheng Xi and his five students, three boys and two girls aged between 12 and 14, who have won prizes in the First Lego League, an international robotics competition for teenagers. The school began some robotics courses in 2002 and integrated them into its formal curriculum in 2004. It is easy to interpret the attraction of the subject as a metaphor for a soulless culture in which people are taught to aspire to the state of automatons. But nothing could be farther from the reality.
As I talked to Cheng Xi, whose father and grandfather were well-known Chinese painters, his students moved around on their own, programming their robots through laptop computers, and setting up the tables on which to display their projects. They were focused and disciplined but also enthusiastic and engaged. One of the projects was about the sea, which was the theme they were given for the Lego competition. To accompany it, three of the students performed a little drama about the damage that dragnets do to sea-life, dressing up in vibrant costumes and dancing along to classical music to make a gentle protest against the rape of the environment. The other project was pure play, with four robots playing football against each other, using light sensors to detect the ball and to move across a pitch whose surface was carefully painted in graduated shades of light and dark in order to guide their movements.
And then they showed me a dancing robot doll they had made. Over the mechanism they had draped a richly costumed effigy of the ancient monkey god, Song Wu Kong. Moving from side to side, he whirled a stick in martial movements, fulfilling his legendary role of protecting thepoor and weak against the strong and evil. The choice of god was interesting: Song Wu Kong is the trickster, the antic spirit, the troublemaker, good-hearted but mischievous, forever upsetting carefully-laid plans.
The kids seemed to have found in their robot monkey god a perfect image of the great technological dream of a world in which machines lift the burden of drudgery and allow humans to play.
THAT DREAM CAME to Wu Yulu when he was even younger than the kids in Wangjing. As he watched people walk along the road, he asked himself the questions that sane people don't ask: how does walking happen? What makes certain movements produce a forward motion? Could a machine do it? Could you make such a machine? He hadn't seen robots in movies or comic strips and he thought he was the first person to ask these questions. He began to devote all his spare time and money to finding the answers to his questions and hasn't stopped for thirty-five years. Over that time, he has created 25 robots. "It takes 10 years of thinking to create one robot," he says. "Then it's practising, testing, trial and error, until you get it right." But this wasn't what a peasant was supposed to be doing, and in the bad years when all "useless" knowledge was suspect, Wu might have been an obvious target for denunciation and abuse. "A lot of my neighbours thought I was crazy and couldn't understand why I was wasting my time like this." But Wu won them over by adapting an old bicycle to make a machine that could sow seed and scatter fertiliser. Gradually, the eccentric inventor in their midst became a source of pride and his machines a source of wonder and amusement. When he burned down the house during one his experiments, the villagers built the one he and his family now inhabit. More recently, since he won a TV competition to find the smartest peasant in China, he has become a bit of a national celebrity.
He is still poor, and his ambition to have his own institute for the study of robotics is far from fulfilment, but at least he is no longer a lunatic. In an odd variation on the old Maoist practice of sending intellectuals to the countryside to learn from the peasants, groups of university students come to his house every year to study his techniques. "They know more than I do about computers and theories, but I know more than they do about how to make things work."
He wants now to make a robot that can think like a human being and respond intelligently to the world around it. The idea may be fanciful, but not much more so than the notion of a poorly-educated peasant making the funny and fascinating machines that have already emerged from the shed in his courtyard. And he may already have helped in his own small way to turn an often insentient system into one capable of intelligent responses to the world. Mawu village and Tongzhou county have come to take pride in an eccentric, non-conformist dreamer. China as a whole has to come to terms with the fact that such people function best in societies that leave room for mavericks.