In 1985, a wave of commemorative events swept the globe to mark the fortieth anniversary of the victory over colonialism and fascism.

Li Runshi delivered an address. The victory of the Second World War, he stated, was a magnificent triumph for the liberation of the entire world. It was not only the vast colonies that had been freed, but the people of the industrial nations as well.

The speech was highly regarded worldwide. Before the end of that war, the world had been a place of constant conflict; the interval between the two world wars had been a mere twenty years.

In the forty years since 1945, however, no large-scale war had erupted. By the standards of the pre-war era, the skirmishes that had occurred were little more than minor border incidents.

As the world’s hegemon, China had maintained global peace for four decades—an achievement that earned it a grade far above passing.

Economically, every nation had seen significant development. Even the poorest African states had entered the agricultural age, possessing economic systems that, while not high-yielding, were sufficient to sustain their national finances.

Thus, the anniversary was celebrated with particular fervor in Africa. During the Second World War, tens of millions of Africans had joined the World People's Liberation Army, throwing themselves into the cause.

The price had been immense: 910,000 African officers and men had sacrificed their lives, while another 2.75 million had been wounded.

Yet the African people loved that war and took pride in their contribution. Before its outbreak, three million Africans had been murdered or tortured to death by colonizers annually. Three million deaths every year—yet in the world of that time, those lives were treated as dust, their passing unknown and unremarked.

The 3.66 million African casualties of the WPLA, by contrast, each possessed a photograph and a complete personnel file. It was the largest archive of its kind in African history, a testament to the era when Africans were treated with genuine equality.

The African delegations to China included not only heads of state but vast numbers of WPLA veterans. Most of the WPLA’s core leadership had passed away by this time. Marshal Cheng Ruofan, the former Director of Logistics, was gravely ill, yet he insisted on delivering a speech from his hospital bed, thanking the revolutionaries of the world for uniting to liberate mankind.

The formal end of the Second World War was recorded as May 4, 1945. On May 1st, 1985, the African leaders arrived in the Chinese capital and entered the He Rui Memorial Hall to pay their respects to his remains.

While every home in Africa did not yet possess a television, at least one in four urban families owned one. In the countryside, every village had at least one set. Through the live broadcasts, the majority of the African people saw He Rui for the first time in their lives.

By this time, six-year compulsory education was universal in Africa, and half of school-aged youth finished middle school. Based on descriptions in history books and low-resolution photographs, they had imagined He Rui as a towering, majestic military leader.

In the propaganda of the African left, He Rui was portrayed as a laborer, no different from a worker, farmer, or herdsman. Thus, the images on African posters tended toward this ideal.

They were shocked, then, to find that the man who had won the Second World War and lay peacefully in his crystal coffin was a handsome youth with pale skin, smooth features, pink lips, and long eyelashes. In the African aesthetic, he possessed the appearance of a refined noble scion.

This visual impact, while startling, only deepened their interest in the life of the man himself.

Another nation with a profound interest in He Rui was the Soviet Union.

During the forty years of peace, the performance of the Soviet government had been unsatisfactory to its own people. The high command of the Soviet Party had decided upon a path of radical internal reform.

Stalin had passed away in 1956. In 1955, Kirov had been forced into retirement due to failing health. This had triggered a fierce power struggle over the succession. Upon Stalin’s death, a faction led by Khrushchev staged what amounted to a coup, executing Beria and purging Molotov and Zhukov. This had fundamentally destroyed the fragile institutional stability that had been under construction.

Soviet culture inherited the Russian legacy, which was rooted in Mongolian traditions. After the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire, Mongolian court traditions had fused with Byzantine culture to shape the Russian elite.

In a culture already lacking the concept of high-level political stability and existing in a frozen environment where "white disasters" (blizzards) could strike at any moment, Stalin’s institutional model had indeed strengthened the USSR's resilience. It had produced great results. Yet this unprecedented cultural height had been limited by the inherent weakness of Soviet civilian industry.

Low-quality civilian goods could not generate profit. Even if economic cooperation with China kept living standards respectable, the USSR was forced to compete with China in the East and with Western European prosperity in the West. The engine of the Soviet economy remained heavy industry.

The problem was that the industrial level of China and Western Europe exceeded that of the USSR. Furthermore, in its pursuit of national security, the Soviet Union had funneled enormous effort into nuclear research and development.

In Russian culture, possessing a nuclear weapon naturally implied using it to threaten others. During the Khrushchev era, the Politburo assumed that threatening China would trigger a response—one they expected would be a simple military escalation. They never expected China’s actual response: the total suspension of all heavy industrial orders and cooperation.

The Soviet government knew well that the public who had lived through the global war did not believe China would attack them. Had China intended to do so, they would have acted long ago.

Thus, while the government attempted to paint China as a security threat, they could never make the narrative stick. Instead, they tried to frame China as a "quasi-enemy" state that sought only to suppress Soviet influence.

Under this propaganda, the Soviet government increased its conventional military spending. While this stimulated heavy industry, it saddled the nation with a crushing burden.

By 1984, when a new General Secretary took office, a consensus for reform had formed within the Party.

Over the previous forty years, the USSR had repeatedly attempted to learn from the Chinese model, with poor results. Consequently, they decided to import reform ideas from the West.

Radical internal reform required a peaceful external environment. The West pledged its firm support, and a Soviet delegation traveled to China to seek Beijing’s public backing as well.

The task was not difficult. Successive Chinese governments had maintained a policy of demilitarized borders with the USSR to preserve their geopolitical interests. Thus, the Soviet delegation quickly received everything it sought.

In June 1945, with their surroundings stabilized, the Soviet Party began the process of "Shock Therapy."

As the reforms commenced, Western governments and media were effusive in their praise.

By this time, Li Runshi’s health was failing, and he lacked the strength to provide continued analysis for Chinese society. Consequently, a significant portion of the Chinese public—who had come to see the post-war order as the natural state of things—assumed the Soviet reforms would succeed.

By April 1986, after a year of "Shock Therapy," a new class of oligarchs within the Soviet Party had seized immense wealth. The national riches accumulated over seventy years had fallen entirely into the hands of the elite.

Within the various republics, the leadership of the Russian SFSR had long felt that Russia was sacrificing too much for the Union—that its wealth was being siphoned off to sustain the other republics.

Once the national wealth had been transferred to the Party elite, the Russian leadership decided to shed the burden. They sought to transform the USSR into a loose Commonwealth of Independent States without fiscal transfer payments, thereby ending the drain on Russia.

There was a precedent for this: "One America, Two Governments" had proven an excellent means for the American states to escape internal fiscal transfers.

The Soviet Union had attempted the Chinese model of a centralized unitary state, but every attempt had only cost Russia more and was eventually abandoned.

As the USSR transitioned from a single state to a loose commonwealth, the international order established after the Second World War began to undergo a violent transformation.

Li Runshi never expected that before his life ended, he would witness the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In a daze, he recalled what He Rui had once told him: "If you are lucky, you will see the collapse of the USSR. To deny the Soviet Union is to deny the socialist system it built. When that happens, not only the state but the Party itself will be destroyed."

Recalling it now, Li could clearly see He Rui’s expression at the time. It hadn't been the look of a man performing a calculation; it had been the look of someone who had seen the event with his own eyes. He Rui had been trying, with absolute gravity, to explain to Li the theoretical causes of that collapse.

Li wanted to smile bitterly, but he found he lacked even the strength for a sound. Turning his head with effort toward the white ceiling, he sighed in his heart: *Has the world once again overlapped with the pre-judgment of a genius Idealist?*

Yet he felt a touch of joy. He had been worried about the growing number of voices in China questioning and opposing the global fiscal transfers. Since the policy of transferring wealth through the World Bank had been He Rui’s creation, and Li had been its staunchest executor, his opponents had lacked even the chance to "wrap themselves in the tiger's skin" of the Chairman's legacy. They had been forced to turn to nationalism for support.

The collapse of the USSR and its Party was a perfect case study. It allowed the Chinese people to see exactly what kind of catastrophic chain reaction a systemic collapse would bring.

On December 25, 1986, the sickle-and-hammer flag of the Soviet Union was lowered from the Kremlin, replaced by the tricolor of Russia. The USSR vanished from the map.

The following day, December 26th, Li Runshi passed away.

The day after his death, the National Chairman of China delivered a televised address: "...China shall unswervingly follow the socialist path and unswervingly maintain the healthy development of the global economy... We shall maintain stability and never waver..."

The shock of the Soviet collapse was greater than anyone at the time could have imagined. Conventional wisdom held that since China was also a communist state, the fall of the USSR and its ruling party would deal a fatal blow to the Chinese path.

Yet by 1988, global capital had cast its vote with its actions. While a significant amount had fled China in 1987, it returned in 1988 with redoubled enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, in the United States, industrial competition from China and Europe had driven the nation to the brink of a new civil war between the urban centers and the suburban/rural belts.

The Confederate government in the South, focused on agricultural exports, remained culturally conservative and socially stable. The news of the Soviet collapse served as the final catalyst for the already divided nation; the Confederate States formally declared their independence.

This time, the United States of America lacked the will to maintain a nominal unity by force. Nuclear weapons could destroy the world, but they could yield no profit. The population of the Northern industrial zones could no longer be transformed into soldiers for another grand campaign. The American middle class had no desire for a war over a name.

In 1989, the two nations that had once seemed capable of joining forces against China had both split. From that moment on, China stood as the world's sole superpower.

On September 30, 1999, the first manned Mars exploration vessel reached the Earth-Moon Lagrange point. It was poised to begin humanity’s first landing on another planet in the solar system. The launch was scheduled for the following day—China’s National Day. Far from meeting opposition, the move enjoyed near-universal support from all nations.

The journey alone would take a year, yet the astronauts were filled with confidence. They hailed from Asia, Africa, America, and Europe. Messages of support poured in from every corner of the globe, wishing the mission success.

The African members of the crew received a particularly high volume of blessings. In the current world, Africa remained a relatively weak region, yet its people had never given up hope.

The New Order He Rui had established for the world was one based on fiscal transfers. Africa possessed resources, people, and a market, making it a trade-deficit region. The industrial nations reaped a massive surplus from it.

Under the rules He Rui had established, these developing nations received an annual refund of their trade deficits from the previous years.

But the money was not a gift.

To receive the subsidies, these nations had to follow development plans approved by the New Order’s evaluation bodies and successfully execute them.

Africa had followed this path step-by-step. They had begun with agriculture and irrigation, raising their level of food security. They had moved on to transport infrastructure and the development of administrative capacity. Then came the elimination of pollution and environmental protection. Finally, they had turned to new energy sources like solar power, using the abundant energy to smelt seawater, piping fresh water into deserts and wastelands. They produced grain on once-barren sands and returned original riverbeds and water sources to the forest, protecting the planet's biodiversity.

None of this had been easy. Africa’s foundation had been weak. The push for productivity and social progress had been marked by intense internal struggle, coups, and even bloody civil wars.

But it had all been worth it. Under the global order He Rui built, Africa had achieved staggering progress. By now, its level of development approached that of Russia.

The Russians still saw themselves as the masters of the former Soviet lands, the core of the Union. Through that lens, the collapse had cost them a hundred million people—sixty million of whom shared close ties of blood.

Russia had briefly prospered by selling energy, but with the explosive growth of Chinese new energy in the 90s and the maturation of related technologies, the global prices of oil and gas remained low. Consequently, even without external military pressure, the Russian economy remained stagnant.

Fifty-five years had passed under the Chinese-led peace. Russia faced no military threats, yet its once-fervent nationalists had devolved into "Skinheads" attacking foreigners within its borders. Such thugs lacked the capacity for war and instead drove away foreign investment.

With a hundred million people lost and an economy only thirty percent of its Soviet peak, the result of this economic defeat was a loss greater than those of the two world wars combined.

Even more tragic was the Russian mindset. It wasn't a case of "drawing a sword and finding no rival"; Russia was simply left to dwell on its past glory while the rest of the world forgot it.

In contrast, solar-rich Africa, surrounded by the Indian, Atlantic, and Mediterranean oceans, lacked neither energy nor the source for seawater smelting. Even with only fifteen percent of the Sahara and Southern Africa reforested, the continent had fundamentally escaped the scarcity of energy, water, and food.

As a developing region, Africa’s rise had catalyzed a total evolution of its domestic politics. Its vibrancy and burgeoning growth were beyond anything the decaying Russia on its frozen plains could match.

And the space achievements of the Soviet era had become a burden for Russia, leading the proud nation to refuse participation in the Chinese-led global space program.

After all, Russia remained a power compared to Europe, Japan, or Korea. But compared to China, it could only occupy the status of a former "Golden Horde." It was a reality the Russians simply could not accept.

On October 1, 1999, nozzles across the spacecraft’s hull issued a precise, pale blue flame under the control of quantum computers. Already moving at high speed within the Earth-Moon system, the Mars-bound vessel began to accelerate.

On the global live stream, comments scrolled across screens everywhere: "Our journey is the sea of stars!"

It was the sincere wish and the genuine expectation of the vast majority of humanity.

In the next moment, the major network companies disabled the comments. For next, the Mars exploration vessel entered the Earth's shadow from the satellite's perspective.

Moments later, under the expert operation of the broadcast crew, the ship emerged from the darkness. On the edge of the blue planet, the brilliant light of dawn flickered, illuminating the vessel's silver hull.

As the magnificent dawn filled the screen, a line of text appeared for all to see:

"Dear friends, the Dawn of human civilization has descended!"

**The End.**