“Hide your strength and bide your time,” Deng Xiaoping, the transformative Chinese premier, once advised – a maxim that became shorthand for China’s post-Cold War foreign policy. It urged patience, strategic restraint and the quiet accumulation of national power, while avoiding confrontations that could derail domestic development. The idea — taoguang yanghui — shaped Beijing’s external posture for decades.
For decades, Beijing followed that script closely.
