Preventing the struggles of national minorities goes beyond physical intervention, it should involve a new type of political action and thought which achieves a balance between ethnic groups. Hu Jintao should worry, not much more time is left to fix what has been broken.

Asia-Pacific is the region in which the United States’ ability to face up to its greatest geopolitical challenge will be made clear; it is there where the desire to strengthen a multipolar order expected to weaken the hegemonic American condition can be most intensely felt.

The new Chinese leaders have decided to leave behind what little remains of Maoism. The rural reform currently promoted gives evidence to an undeniable reality: the inexorable advance of the privatization of land, either directly or covertly, which is getting rid of one of the strongest signs of that China that was born in 1949, states the author.

The diplomacy –especially in relation to economics– that China is implementing in Latin America will alter the region’s foreign economic relations at an accelerated pace, along with the geopolitical axes that had appeared immutable up until today. Meanwhile, the image of the United States and the European Union remains unchanged.

Today´s China is less isolated than ever, but its absence from international scene continues to be reinforced by the peculiarity of a process that can only be offset by proponents of opportunity and progress. Although more powerful than ever, China´s sociopolitical model and economic interdependence causes it to remain very vulnerable, says the author.

• A New Opportunity for a Dialogue between Beijing and Taipei?
  por Xulio Ríos
• Who would stand up in China?
  por Joel Adriano

Is the relationship between China and Taiwan changing? The last official economic meeting between the respective authorities removed the hypothesis of the conflict. However, even intensifying the economic changes, the unification has not been considered, and not only because of Taipei’s objections: such a geopolitical change in the zone would question the influence of Washington in the region.

• Taiwan opposite Kosovo
  por Xulio Ríos
• Post-Tiananmen China: A Case of Selective Amnesia
  por Xulio Ríos

The supporters of Taiwanese independence consider Kosovo to be a precedent that encourages them not to give up in their struggle. Nevertheless, the differences between the two cases are obvious, and not only due to the democratic imperative necessary to constitute a state; neither the origin of the dispute nor the regional and international context of the two cases is similar either. This is why the consequences of Kosovo’s independence will probably be felt more in the South Caucasus (Transcaucasia) or Europe rather than in the Far East, states the author.

• The Kosovan State is unviable
  por Raquel Sánchez Bujaldón
• Kosovo´s final status: another chapter of turmoil in the Balkans?
  por Borja Lasheras
• China-Taiwan: Playing with...the Torch
  por Xulio Ríos

Xulio Rios believes that the majority of the problems that caused the manifestations in Tiananmen Square eighteen years ago are not only still present in China today, but that many of those problems have gotten worse: corruption and power abuses are on the day’s agenda.

• Southeast Asia reduces poverty, but increases inequality
  por Viviana Malvina Sosa
• China-Taiwan: Playing with...the Torch
  por Xulio Ríos

Xulio Rí­os explains how the passing of the Torch to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics has created enormous tension between China and Taiwan. Not even sports are capable of pacifying the complicated relationship between Beijing and Taipei.