Os gigantes asiáticos

«The nearly simultaneous arrival of China and India to places of prominence on the world stage represents a tectonic shift in global affairs with few parallels”.These two giants, with 40 percent of the world's people between them - as much as the population of the next 20 largest countries combined - have long slumbered in the shadows of Europe, Japan, and the United States, which dominated world affairs during most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. [...] While commentators have compared their rise to the end of the cold war, the more apt analogies are less recent: civilization-changing events such as the rise of the Roman Empire or the discovery of the New World. And even those are pale historical comparisons since they touched only a fraction of the human populations of their day.»
In “State of the World 2006 – special focus : China and India” WorldWatch Institute.