Echoes of the Future

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has a mission called "Echoes of the Future." The Dark Templar Zeratul goes alone to Aiur, to the corpse of the Overmind, the mind of an enemy everyone believed was finished. He fights his way to four of its tendrils and touches each one, because the prophecy he is chasing can only be read in the memory of the dead. At the centre he meets the spirit of Tassadar, a hero who fell years before, and learns what is coming.

The idea behind the mission is simple. The future is not read in the present. It is read in what the past left behind.

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The question

Why does the Chinese Communist Party spend so much effort controlling the past? A regime confident about its future would not need to. The answer is that the Party knows which past it stands on, and which past stands against it.

The structure

At the start of the twentieth century, Asia had two roads in front of it.

The first ran through Asian self-assertion. In 1905 Japan defeated the Russian Empire, on land at Mukden and at sea at Tsushima. It was the first time in the modern era that an Asian state had beaten a European great power in a full war. From Rangoon to Calcutta, and in the Chinese revolutionary circles of Tokyo, people concluded that empire was not a law of nature. Sun Yat-sen later said that Asians had taken the victory as their own.

The second road ran to Moscow. In 1921 the Comintern founded a party in Shanghai. Its cadres were trained in Soviet schools and its budget came from Soviet hands. When the Red Army entered Manchuria in August 1945, the arsenals it captured from Japan's armies went to the Communist forces. The People's Republic of 1949 was the result: a state on Asian land, built to Moscow's design.

That is what "Yellow Russia" means. It is not a description of a people. It is a description of a structure: an Asian face on a Soviet frame. The Party chose the side of the empire that had pushed deepest into Asia, and it has spent seventy years presenting that choice as national liberation.

The timeline

• 1905: Mukden and Tsushima. An Asian navy sinks a European fleet.
• 1921: Shanghai. The Comintern founds the Chinese Communist Party.
• 1945: Soviet tanks in Manchuria. Captured Japanese weapons pass to the Communists.
• 1950: In Moscow, Mao signs the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance.
• 1991: The Soviet Union dissolves. The nations it held come back with their memories intact.
• 2022: Beijing and Moscow announce a partnership with "no limits." Three weeks later Russia invades Ukraine.

The echo

The first road did not vanish when Japan lost its war. It continued in the independent states of Asia, in the alliances that hold the Pacific together, in the democracies of Japan, Korea and Taiwan, and in every Asian society that has refused to become someone's province. The second road leads, once again, back to Moscow, to an empire that is spending its own future in Ukraine.

These are the echoes. A past that was supposed to be over keeps sending its signal forward, and the Party keeps tying its fate to the residue of an empire in decline. When the forces that the twentieth century scattered across Asia meet again, the verdict on the party that chose Moscow will not come from Beijing's historians.

Zeratul did not change the past. He read it. The Overmind was dead, and its memory still told him everything. The Party is very much alive, and it is still afraid of what its own memory would say.