The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank: China’s Multilateral Experiment

In 2016 the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) opened its doors as China’s first major foray in creating and leading an international organization with global membership. All major donor countries joined, with the exception of the United States and Japan. Today the AIIB is a medium-sized multilateral development bank (MDB) with a global membership second only to that of the World Bank.

This book explains the complexity of the AIIB: a liberal international organization designed by a group of state and MDB experts to reflect the existing norms and rules of development banking while, at the same time, it is the creation of an illiberal state that interacts with the existing order in ways that often contradict those norms and rules. Gutner argues that the AIIB is largely cut from the same cloth as other MDBs and faces similar challenges and criticism. However, a growing contradiction between conflicting Chinese institutional strategies risks turning the AIIB into the Potemkin village of China’s international development and regional governance strategies--a showcase of actions that follow global norms of development banking, within a larger landscape of institutions that do not. The book advances our understanding of how institutional diffusion takes place in the system of MDBs and is a reminder of the importance of a nuanced approach to understanding China’s institutional strategies.

Tamar Gutner, Associate Professor, Department of Politics, Governance, and Economics, American University, School of International Service

Tamar Gutner is Associate Professor International Relations at American University’s School of International Service. She is the author of International Organizations in World Politics (2023), Banking on the Environment: Multilateral Development Banks and Their Environmental Performance in Central and Eastern Europe (2002), and has written numerous journal articles and book chapters on international organizations, with an emphasis on evaluating their performance. She is a recipient of the Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars. She served as a fellow at the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office and consults for other international financial institutions.