This is the first article in a three-part series focusing on China's transformed financial role on the world stage. "Hide your brightness; bide your time," cautioned Deng Xiaoping, the chief architect of modern China who was the country's supreme ruler from 1978 until the 1990s. Deng oversaw the "opening" of China into a modern state-capitalist society. He articulated a strategy for China's integration into the global economic system - a strategy that progressed over the past four decades such that the world's most populous nation is now its second largest economy, increasingly able to flex its new geopolitical and economic power and ambitions