张豪 供稿

The discussion of the evolving multilateral financing platform, the AIIB, has risen to an
unexpected level among China’s domestic commentators and international observers alike. Within 
the country, the emphasis on China’s leadership in the AIIB has gone so far as to sacrifice many 
serious evaluations for merely wishful thinking (or emotional claims) of national revival in the 
international financial order and beyond. Partly because of China’s domestic optimism, a 
considerable number of Western scholars have warned of the potential challenge, if not threat, 
from the AIIB and its principal supporter towards the Breton Woods System. To me, such dual 
exaggerations of China’s role in the AIIB and the AIIB’s role in the global financial system have 
loomed large at the expense of more rational and objective assessments. For this reason, Professor Injoo Sohn was obliged to demystify and disenchant a China-led AIIB.

The domestic narratives of the AIIB more or less identify the new investment bank as an 
instrumental part of China’s foreign economic strategy through which the country could start to 
gradually reshape and reform the existing unequal rules and norms. Thus China’s creative 
initiation of and active participation in the AIIB’s establishing process would be naturally over-
interpreted as the country’s leading position. Such expectations, strengthened by the domestic 
nationalist sentiment, may easily be divorced from reality. In this regard, Chinese government 
proves wise enough to eschew any reference to the wording of “leadership”, because it is simply 
not the truth. At least, the AIIB Charter, after rounds of negotiations and compromises, will guide 
and constrain all signatories including the most powerful one. Given its unremitting stress on 
becoming a responsible great power, it is virtually impossible to consider China’s unilateral 
actions within the framework regardless of tremendous reputation costs. On the other hand, two 
conspicuous outsiders (US and Japan) as well as some of their long-time allies within the Bank are 
likely to remain hyper-cautious about China’s every motion and the motives behind it. Insofar as 
China voluntarily agreed to allow its voting share to decrease in principle, all the other members 
contributing to the capital pool could expect a larger say in the future.

The international concerns about the AIIB’s potential challenges are more of a self-fulfilling 
prophecy derived from the deep-seated China Threat logic and unjustified geopolitical anxieties. 
Even if China indeed enjoys a larger say in the new Bank, AIIB still has to operate within the 
basic framework of an investment bank, seeking development opportunities and commercial 
interests rather than revision of current international financial standards. But even its most general 
mandates turn out to be a complicated task, especially for China. It is true that all the positive 
predictions about AIIB’s future will be invalidated to some degree by multiple difficulties faced 
by this institutional latecomer: how to sustain financial cooperation with repeated regional 
conflicts over intractable territorial disputes, how to ensure stable return on long-term and capital-
intensive infrastructure investments in politically risky regions, how to deal with financial burdens 
on least developed countries, and how to maintain environmental and labor standards. Perhaps a 
more pressing challenge comes from home, as many Chinese scholars have opposed such an 
expensive scheme from the very beginning. Without clear answers to these questions, no one 
could be confident in the successful functioning of the Bank, not to mention its unrealistic 
ambition to challenge the dominance of extant global financial mechanisms.

Indeed, the AIIB may provide an experimental opportunity for China’s development model 
in the region, despite the vagueness and ambiguity of what this model is. AIIB has ushered in 
many hopes in the time of the normative fragmentation (Washington Consensus vs. Beijing 
Consensus), but it is still far from a satisfactory answer to the future of multilateral development 
financing.



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