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It is the eve of the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games, and Beijing is preparing to welcome the world. Olympic banners and posters line the main avenues of the capital, and thousands of volunteers, brightly clad in blue, white and yellow shirts, fan out to the airport, hotels and subway stations to assist visitors. At the iconic National Stadium, dubbed the Bird’s Nest because of its soaring latticework of steel supports, officials go through final preparations for the opening extravaganza directed by moviemaker Zhang Yimou, which will dazzle hundreds of millions of television viewers around the globe. U.S. President George W. Bush and a host of other world leaders are arriving to take part in the festivities — and to acknowledge China’s reemergence as a major economic and political power. After 30 years of breakneck development, China is ready and eager to claim its place on the world stage.

Such powerful ambition is also evident at the spanking new offices of China Investment Corp., the country’s fledgling $200 billion sovereign wealth fund. Barely a year old, CIC has already made its name and heft felt throughout the world, taking high-profile ownership stakes in premier U.S. banking institutions and, like Chinese emperors of old, receiving a seemingly endless line of suppliants. In June 2007, even before its formal establishment, the fund bought 9.9 percent of private equity giant Blackstone Group for a cool $3 billion and then in December helped recapitalize Morgan Stanley with a $5.6 billion injection. More than 100 A-list global fund managers, including such illustrious firms as U.S.-based Franklin Templeton Investments and Pacific Investment Management Co. and U.K.-based Aberdeen Asset Management and Ashmore Investment Management, are vying for a slice of the $30 billion or more in investment mandates that CIC will award later this year, and a Who’s Who of financial dignitaries regularly pass through the fund’s central Beijing offices, a short 15-minute drive from Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. On the day before the official opening of the Olympics, an array of international financiers drops in for meetings. Among them: David Rubenstein, co-founder and managing director of private equity firm Carlyle Group, and Caio Koch-Weser, vice chairman of Deutsche Bank and former German deputy Finance minister.

In the midst of a wrenching credit crisis that has humbled many, if not most, of the biggest banks, sovereign wealth funds, though often shrouded in secrecy and controversy, have emerged as the last best hope for saving a financial system on the brink. Some, like Norway’s Government Pension Fund - Global and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, are bigger, and others, like the Kuwait Investment Authority, established in 1953, are older, but arguably no fund packs the clout of CIC, the investment arm of a resurgent China.

For Lou Jiwei, the fund’s powerful chairman and chief executive officer, the aim is clear: Make CIC one of the world’s biggest and best-performing fund managers, an investing juggernaut with a stature commensurate with China’s growing economic power.

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