Expert Speak Raisina Debates
Published on Nov 01, 2019
AIIB is designed to please and be pleasing. In its dealings with established MDBs, it comes to praise, not to bury. It is in this respect an effective instrument for the promotion of Chinese soft power.
China and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank It began with a vision by China’s President Xi Jinping. In October 2013, Xi made his first trip to Southeast Asia since assuming office in March. In speeches to Indonesia’s Parliament and at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) CEO Summit in Bali, Xi proposed to establish “an Asian infrastructure investment bank to promote interconnectivity and economic integration in the region.”<1> President Xi was careful to emphasise the complementary, noncompetitive nature of the financial institution China envisioned, so as not to incur friction with existing multilateral development banks (MDBs)<2> — namely the 67-member Asian Development Bank (ADB), headquartered in the Philippines and led by Japan as plurality shareholder, and the World Bank Group’s three lending arms, all headquartered in Washington, D.C. and led by the United States. The new Chinese proposal came amid cooperation among Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (the BRICS countries) to establish a new MDB, following a 2012 proposal by India and an agreement among the five countries in March 2013. The BRICS’ New Development Bank (NDB) was widely understood as a collective expression of shared frustration at stalled reforms over “voice and voting” power in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the wake of the 2007-09 global financial crisis. But now China sought to go further, with a separate initiative that it would lead. (The NDB’s initial capital of US$100 billion is divided equally among the five countries, and although headquartered in Shanghai, an Indian serves as its first president). China’s new proposal also came alongside the announcement of its stunningly ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, with linkages from Pacific Asia to Europe and the Persian Gulf. In scope and timing, President Xi’s proposal for a new Asian infrastructure investment bank seemed clearly linked to this overland Belt network and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road concept. The latter did not mollify some concerned analysts who already perceived a Chinese “String of Pearls” strategy to encircle India and make China the dominant geopolitical power in the Indo-Pacific region<3> — though China maintained that its “connectivity” vision was commercial and cultural in nature. Beginning in January 2014, China convened other interested parties for a series of five Multilateral Consultation Meetings, culminating in a Memorandum of Understanding on Establishing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in October 2014, signed by 22 countries designated as Prospective Founding Members (PFMs).<4> Despite some reservations, India signed on at the outset, in the view that it stood to benefit materially from such an institution and in order to shape its design. Chief Negotiators for each of the countries set to work on creating the charter. A mechanism and timetable were established for bringing in additional countries during the negotiations. In all, 50 founding members signed the AIIB Charter at a ceremony in Beijing on June 29, 2015, with additional countries signing on as the AIIB readied to open by the year’s end. The US and Japan did not participate, although allies in Asia and across Europe and the Middle East did, such that the founding membership extended well beyond its original Asian roster.<5> Startup capital would be US$100 billion, around two-thirds of the ADB’s capital base and somewhat less than half that of the World Bank. China’s ability to draw so much support so swiftly for its initiative revealed America’s diminished influence.<6> The Obama administration lobbied allies not to join, only to see friendly countries such as Australia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom accept the invitations of JinLiqun, China’s official who would head the bank. ADB and World Bank officials expressed cautious optimism about potential collaboration with the new bank. Liqun recruited former staff from the institutions to participate in the AIIB’s creation, which substantially (though not entirely) mitigated concerns over “a lack of clarity about AIIB’s governance,” including environmental, social impact, and procurement standards.<7> China insisted that the AIIB would adopt rigorous standards reflecting best practices of the experienced MDBs. But the exclusive focus of the AIIB on infrastructure — and not anti-poverty and social sector lending — implied a narrower range of criteria in assessing whether to lend for projects. AIIB’s first half-decade has inspired a burgeoning scholarly literature addressing its membership, its material and normative impact, and its implications for the balance of power in development finance and attendant influence in Asia and beyond. The consensus is clear: the AIIB is a major development in the global political economy. One study calls it the “most prominent Chinese-led global governance initiative”<8>; another “a landmark development in Asian regionalism” and marker of “a new phase in China’s economic diplomacy.”<9> Still another assumes that “the AIIB represents a paradigm-shift vis-à-vis global economic governance as a consequence of China’s growing dissatisfaction towards the existing architecture of international financial institutions.”<10> A Latin America specialist called the AIIB “the ‘talk of the town’ in international relations circles” in the region.<11> And yet most scholars also find that in its design and lending operations to date, the AIIB is hardly the disruptive development that early reports and US diplomacy warned about. In most ways, its design mirrors that of established MDBs, although there are some important differences. Most AIIB projects so far have been in partnership with the ADB and the World Bank, with the latter lenders in the lead on criteria and safeguards. Even so, there is no denying China’s preponderant position as the AIIB’s dominant shareholder and leading member-state, with the power to set the bank’s agenda and couse. A key question remains: “What does China want from the AIIB?”<12> But divining Chinese intentions alone will not be sufficient to understand what the AIIB may yet become. For one thing, the history of the Western-led international financial institutions is one of significant organizational evolution and innovation, such that today’s World Bank institutions (and the IMF) are significantly different creatures than their American and European-led founders envisioned at their creation.<13> And even if China were to impose a heavier hand in leading the AIIB in years to come, it is already clear that the bank is but one important element in China’s rapidly expanding foreign economic policy: the right hand and the left do not always work in coordination.

Actors

While centred in Asia, the AIIB has quickly shaped into a global institution, both in its membership — the Non-Regional Members category s Africa, the Americas, and Europe — and in the scope of its lending operations. As of late 2018, membership in the bank is 87 states and counting, 20 more countries than the ADB and almost half the membership of the World Bank. This global scope is significant both in expanding borrowing opportunities for states whose infrastructure needs cannot be met by existing multilateral and commercial lenders and in providing a forum for other leading states to both

AIIB is designed to please and be pleasing. In its dealings with established MDBs, it comes to praise, not to bury. It is in this respect an effective instrument for the promotion of Chinese soft power.

learn from and impart some influence on the emerging pattern of Chinese-led infrastructure investment in Asia and around the world. As has been observed, “its largest shareholders are the most important states in both Asia and Europe: China, India, Russia, the UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy.”<14> In Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and Sudan are members, South Africa remains a PFM, and Kenya is a Prospective Member following approval of its application in May 2018. In the Americas, the US remains a key holdout on joining or supporting the AIIB. The Obama administration left office as the bank was rapidly taking shape, but had been generally committed to “not allow China to write rules in the Asia-Pacific region.”<15> Specifically, and substantially but not entirely self-servingly, the US position reflected a concern that in lending with fewer strings attached, a Chinese-led bank would “undercut standards” in development finance and set up a “race to the bottom” in quick funding for environmentally and socially disruptive infrastructure projects.<16> The Trump administration has been “openly disdainful of multilateralism and many of the international organisations the United States helped create,” giving China an opening “to step into the leadership void,” according to American political scientist Tamar Gutner. She calls the AIIB “the best showcase of China’s leadership aspiration.”<17> So far, US concerns about a “race to the bottom” appear to have been overstated. The US eventually may come to support the AIIB, just as it dropped its initial opposition to the ADB and the World Bank’s International Development Association facility for low-income countries in the 1960s. But if and when it does, it will be in the context of waning and not ascending US influence, even in its own hemisphere. Canada joined the AIIB in March 2018, with a one percent vote share. In Latin America, Chile was the first state to pursue membership, and is joined by Prospective Members Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. It is telling that of these states, Venezuela — economically distressed and diplomatically estranged from the US — has committed the highest subscription to the AIIB, at US$209 million for a 0.2 percent vote share. The region’s collective vote share amounts to less than half of one percent, or less than half of Canada’s share.<18> Brazil, drawn inward by political crisis and its own economic troubles, has seen its participation lag, and it is yet unclear how President Jair Bolsonaro, from the far right, will position the country in the multilateral domain. Latin American engagement with the AIIB looks set to deepen. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and AIIB have signed a strategic partnership agreement, and AIIB was a guest at IDB’s annual meeting in Argentina in 2018. In 2019, the IDB will meet in China — a first for the bank, and only the third time it has met in Asia. As for Asia, Japan is the region’s only major economy to stand outside the AIIB as it continues to lead the ADB, even as the latter frequently engages the AIIB as a partner. The ten Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) states and South Korea were all founding members of the new bank. Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were among the inaugural borrowers. One scholar observed that in Asia, “ost of AIIB’s inaugural ventures directed to countries that remain close to China geopolitically,” including Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan in South and Central Asia.<19> But by the second half of 2017, seven of the AIIB’s 13 proposed projects were in India, which has emerged as the bank’s largest borrower — echoing its cumulative position in the World Bank — even as security ties between China and India have grown tenser during Xi’s demonstrative presidency and under the assertive Modi government. India joined the AIIB in January 2016 and is the second-largest shareholder after China with US$8.4 billion in total subscriptions. In the AIIB’s first two years, India alone accounted for US$1 billion of its US$4.3 billion in Asian lending; as of late 2018, total AIIB commitments in India approach US$2 billion. This arrangement seems to serve both India’s expansive infrastructure needs and the desire of AIIB leadership to emphasise the bank’s multilateralism. As stated AIIB Vice-President Danny Alexander, a former UK Cabinet Minister, “One of the questions I have to deal with a lot is, ‘Is this a Chinese bank?’ And it’s not — it’s a multilateral bank… India is the largest borrower, we’ve invested more in India than anywhere else… it shows that any country in Asia, no matter what their diplomatic relations are, is able to engage with and benefit from the work of the AIIB.”<20> Finally, as a region, Europe has seen significant engagement with the AIIB. Half of the European Union (EU) member countries have joined the bank, along with Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland. A detailed scholarly analysis found that “both strategic and economic factors are important in explaining the various European countries’ policies on joining the AIIB,” and further that the European states who joined also did so with the goal of shaping AIIB governance and lending operations “from within”<21> — and by extension, influencing Chinese infrastructure lending more generally. Whether they might do so depends both on the AIIB’s decision-making rules and norms and on the degree to which China follows a coordinated approach in managing its various and burgeoning lending streams.

Principles, rules, and norms

Jin Liqun wrote recently to reflect on the process of setting up the bank:

AIIB’s reason for being “is reflected in its special governance structure and operating style… Together, we agreed on its signature combination of a non-resident Board, the Board’s delegation of project approval authority to Management and an organizational structure for cost-effectiveness and efficiency, with commitments to transparency and Asian development thinking embedded in the bank’s philosophy…“We were not aiming for a bank to be dominated by one or a few members.<22>

China is, by some distance, the bank’s largest capital subscriber and shareholder, accounting for 31 percent of total subscriptions and with 26.6 percent of voting shares. (India, as the next biggest shareholder, accounts for 7.6 percent voting power.) At more than one-quarter voting share, China has veto power over key questions of overall governance and strategy, but not over “most operational matters, including project approvals.”<23> This is not unusual in MDBs, as the World Bank set the “first among equals” tradition by giving the US veto power in supermajority matters. In practice, the norm has been for decision-making by consensus, but the workings of “consensual” decision-making can be subtle. Veto power is existential: when one state has the ability to oppose, this entails an agenda-setting and discourse-shaping power, well before and beyond formal vote casting. AIIB’s Management holds significant power in project approval, much more than in the World Bank. This, too, is a dimension of potential Chinese influence in the AIIB, given its power in the presidential appointment. Election, suspension, and removal of the president all require a two-thirds supermajority vote by the bank’s Board of Governors; China alone does not hold veto power at this threshold, but it comes close, so its preferences will naturally determine who holds the AIIB presidency. While the AIIB Articles of Agreement stipulate that “n appointing officers and staff and recommending Vice-Presidents, the President is obliged to give paramount importance to the highest standards of efficiency and technical competence, while paying due regard to the recruitment of personnel on as wide a geographic basis as possible” — a near-perfect echo of language in the World Bank’s International Bank of Reconstruction and Development Articles — no such geographic diversity applies to the AIIB presidency itself. Liqun was a senior Chinese official before he was tapped to lead the bank, and future presidents likely will be Chinese. And why not? Every ADB president has been Japanese. Every World Bank president has been American. China’s initial proposals for AIIB funding and governance would have given it more power within the bank, but, critically, the participation of Australia, South Korea, and key European states moderated its positions in several ways. As one commentator notes, “China intended to contribute just over 50 percent of the capital stock, which would give it a veto power over all bank decision-making.”<24> Further, initial reports had suggested that “only three of 20 directorships would be allocated to non-Asian states,” loans would be in renminbi, and “Chinese companies would be prioritised in the awarding of contracts.”<25> Compromises were brokered: nine of just 12 directorships are reserved for Asian members, loans are in US dollars, and construction projects are bid internationally. The AIIB is distinguished from existing MDBs by “its sole focus on infrastructure development, not poverty reduction” and by the extension of loans at commercial, not concessionary rates. Borrowers must demonstrate repayment capacity.<26> But the AIIB’s relative youth, and its co-financing of most projects so far, offer limited scope for comparing its actual operations and impact with those of the established multilateral lenders. Thus, much of the scholarship to date has focused on the bank’s formal design and aspirations.<27> The AIIB is an institution of sound design — from a legal and technical standpoint. The AIIB is designed to please and be pleasing. In its dealings with established MDBs, it comes to praise, not to bury. It is in this respect an effective instrument for the promotion of Chinese soft power. A case in point is a “core phrase/narrative developed by China to describe the AIIB”: the bank as an organisation will be “lean, clean and green.”<28> Who can oppose such a vision, rendered in English rhyme? Established MDBs have not always exhibited the highest standards of accountability and transparency. Organised citizens, “transnational advocacy networks,”<29> investigative journalists, and representative institutions such as (even) the US Congress all played important parts in pressuring the World Bank, for example, into reforms that made it more responsive and transparent. There remain limits to its accountability even now, but achievements in this direction have been hard-won. Can the results of such a processes — of politics — simply be transplanted into a Chinese-led multilateral bank through good intentions, deliberative design, and force of will? If accountability and transparency are affirmed in form, how well will they hold up in the AIIB’s first significant controversies — when there are sharp limits placed on civil society organisation, press freedom, and democratic representation, not only in many of the bank’s borrowers, but in its largest shareholder? For this reason, analysing AIIB projects in a country such as India — a very substantial if imperfect democracy, and as noted, the bank’s second-largest shareholder — will be essential to understanding its workings in coming years. Interestingly, the state of Andhra Pradesh (AP) accounts for a significant share of AIIB’s commitments in India, with three major projects in the pipeline, one of which is the Amaravati Sustainable Capital City Development Project that involves US$200 from AIIB and US$300 million from the World Bank. In the early 2000s, AP’s Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu was a star client of the World Bank in its “focus states” lending strategy.<30> Now Naidu’s government seeks major investment for the new capital city Amaravati, which may prove controversial. A citizens group representing landowners and farmers told the World Bank’s independent Inspection Panel in May 2017 that they had been subjected to “land grab” tactics by state authorities. After a site visit in September, the Inspection Panel initially recommended that the World Bank’s Executive Board approve a full investigation, but it has since delayed its recommendation as it considers “clarifications” by the World Bank’s management.<31> This case could prove to be a crucial test of the integrity of the Inspection Panel process in the new context of a World Bank partnership with the AIIB. The Inspection Panel’s very creation owed much to the World Bank’s difficult experience in a controversial infrastructure project on India’s Narmada River, from which the Bank ultimately withdrew. Faced with a similar controversy today, would the World Bank significantly restructure or even withdraw from a project? Would the AIIB? African democracies will also be key proving grounds for AIIB’s transparency and accountability. The region’s troubled history of indebtedness to the Bretton Woods institutions and Western states has led some analysts to see “debt-trap diplomacy” in the meteoric rise of Chinese lending to African states. From the perspective of a country like Kenya, the interest in joining the AIIB is clear, given ambitious infrastructure plans for developing major internal and regional transport corridors, among other projects. China is already the largest bilateral lender to Kenya, “amassing more than 66 percent of outstanding debt in 2017 ahead of institutions like the IMF.”<32> Nairobi-based political economist Anzeste Were cautions that Kenya’s joining the AIIB will “mask our indebtedness to China,” since the new loans will be listed as multilateral in nature.<33> On the other hand, Chinese investment in Kenya and elsewhere could be improved in quality if subject to the good governance that multilateral administration, at its best, can promote.

Implications

In Chinese development discourse, there is frequent invocation of “crossing the river by feeling the stones” — of moving intentionally, but also incrementally and introspectively. In the basic metaphor, China is the solitary strider. As Chinese leaders have emphasised a collective vision for “harmonious development,” other idyllic images intermingle: Jin Liqun, recalling his assembly of the preparatory team for establishing the bank, writes of envisioning “a caravan along the ancient silk road, its company continuously swelling as it moved forward. China’s leader had planted the seed, yet what made it grow was the shared vision and concerted effort of all shareholders.”<34> It is an inspiring image: a fellowship of seekers on a journey, reaching and crossing the river together, feeling the stones and nurturing growth along the riverbank. But what if China is not the pioneering sower and guide, but is the river itself? Its rising resource tide has tremendous potential to nourish, but in a rapid and unmanaged flow, it also carries the potential to overwhelm and erode the landscape. The AIIB is but one stone set amidst the current. Its shape will be inconstant against the force of so much water. Hameiri and Jones offer one of the most recent assessments of the AIIB, and one of the most thorough so far, in which they offer two simple but essential and related observations. First, China is not a perfectly unitary state, but rather a bureaucratised and fragmented one, and second, the AIIB is but one of several major Chinese initiatives intended to dramatically expand its financial footprint and leadership position in Asia/Eurasia and globally. They argue that “the transformation of the Chinese party-state — its fragmentation, decentralisation, and internationalisation — and the effects of that transformation on China’s external behaviour, pose a more serious challenge to existing development financing norms than the AIIB.” So far, they argue, there appears to be little coordination between the AIIB and other dimensions of China’s regional investment strategy; they go so far as to say that the bank has been “marginalised” and “is hardly involved” in the Belt and Road Initiative, for example.<35> It seems unlikely that this would continue to be the case in coming years, particularly if AIIB begins solely financing a larger number of projects and casts off the training wheels of World Bank, ADB, and other partnerships. But if the AIIB did remain mostly disconnected from the Belt and Road Initiative, that would only mean it stood outside the major stream of Chinese financial activity in Eurasia — either as a strategically positioned but substantively limited multilateral boutique, or as a sign of a much messier and less strategic policy mix than is usually attributed to China. This compartmentalisation of certain infrastructure projects under the AIIB imprimatur, even as China continues to expand bilateral infrastructure lending across many countries, could enhance China’s international image as a cooperative and responsive “development partner” — even as most Chinese investment remains outside whatever scope of transparency and accountability develop around a more independently active AIIB. It is possible that these norms will even find greater expression in the AIIB than in the legacy multilateral institutions, as the newcomer bank draws on lessons learned by the others, and as China and other leading states such as India seek to position themselves as more responsive leaders than their American, European, and Japanese predecessors in the domain of infrastructure investment.But power and financial self-interest also drive the Chinese-led pattern of infrastructure lending in Asia and across the world, with uncertain social and environmental consequences. When a rising power creates a new multilateral organisation in the images of those led by established powers, is it revising or merely reforming the existing order? Like much Asian infrastructure it intends to fund, the AIIB was so swiftly proposed and constructed that scholars only recently have begun to present assessments of its design and functioning. Most conclude that so far, the AIIB has been hardly the revisionist disruptor that early media accounts and US positioning suggested. Yet there can be little doubt that the creation of the AIIB is an important signpost in the broader shift of power away from a US-centred world order, and in the “easternisation” of economics, finance, and geopolitics.<36> It is a marker of China “changing the world from the second place” and — so far at least — “thus pushing for responsible but not destabilizing reforms.”<37> “It is early days” for the AIIB.<38> As the history of the World Bank, IMF, and other international financial institutions suggests, whatever the AIIB may yet become, it may not yet be.
This essay originally appeared in The Raisina Files

Endnotes

<1>China proposes an Asian infrastructure investment bank”, China Daily, October 3, 2013. <2> Xi Jinping, “Deepen Reform and Opening Up and Work Together for a Better Asia Pacific”, APEC CEO Summit, October 7, 2013, Bali, Indonesia. <3> William Yale, “China’s Maritime Silk Road Gamble”, Blog, Foreign Policy Institute, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, March 24, 2015. <4> The initial 22 countries were Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. <5> For a detailed discussion on AIIB’s founding and initial operations, see Natalie Lichtenstein, A Comparative Guide to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press), especially Chapters 1 and 4. <6> See Feng Zhang, “China as a Global Force,” Asia &The Pacific Policy Studies 3, no. 1 (January 2016): 120-128. <7>Why China is creating a new ‘World Bank’ for Asia”, The Economist, November 11, 2014. <8> Shahar Hameiri and Lee Jones, “China Challenges Global Governance? Chinese International Development Finance and the AIIB,” International Affairs 94, no. 3 (May 2018): 574. <9> Jeffrey Wilson, “What Does China Want From the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank?,” Blog, Perth USAsia Centre, The University of Western Australia, June 27, 2017, http://perthusasia.edu.au/blog/analysis-what-does-china-want-from-the-asian-inf <10> Sylvia Menegazzi, “Global Economic Governance Between China and the EU: the Case of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank,” Asia Europe Journal (2017), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10308-017-0477-2 <11> Álvaro Méndez, “The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank Comes Knocking on Latin America’s Door”, Blog, Latin America and the Caribbean, London School of Economics and Political Science, April 27, 2018. <12> See note 10. <13> For authoritative accounts of the World Bank’s history, see Edward S. Mason and Robert E. Asher, The World Bank Since Bretton Woods: The Origins, Policies, Operations, and Impact of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Other Members of the World Bank Group (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1973), and DeveshKapur, John P. Lewis, and Richard C. Webb, The World Bank: Its First Half Century, Vol. 1: History (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1997). On the IMF’s evolution in the early 1980s, see: James M. Boughton, Silent Revolution: The International Monetary Fund 1979-1989 (Washington, D.C.: IMF, 2001) and James M. Boughton, Tearing Down the Walls: The International Monetary Fund, 1990-1999 (Washington, D.C.: IMF, 2012). <14> See note 12. <15> Cited in note 7, p. 126. <16> An anonymous “senior official” in the Obama administration “who spoke on condition of anonymity because the administration asked its members to refrain from publicly criticizing the Chinese proposal,” quoted in Jane Perlez, “U.S. Opposing China’s Answer to World Bank”, The New York Times, October 9, 2014. <17> Tamar Gutner, “AIIB: Is the Chinese-led Development Bank a Role Model?”, Council on Foreign Relations, June 25, 2018. <18> See note 12. <19> Alice De Jonge, “Perspectives on the Emerging Role of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank,” International Affairs 93, no. 5 (2017): 1074. <20> Kiran Stacey, Simon Mundy, and Emily Feng, “India benefits from AIIB loans despite China tensions”, Financial Times, March 18, 2018. <21> Ian Tsung-yen Chen, “European Participation in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank”, Asia Europe Journal (2018), See also: Sylvia Menegazzi, “Global Economic Governance Between China and the EU: the Case of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank”, Asia Europe Journal (2017). <22> Jin Liquin, “Forward,” in note 6, pp. v-vii. <23> See note 9, p. 575. <24> See note 10. <25> See note 9, 575. <26> Ibid. <27> Gregory T. Chin, “Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank: Governance Innovation and Prospects,” Global Governance 22, no. 1 (January 2016): 12. <28> On this narrative, see: Rebecca LaForgia, “Listening to China’s Multilateral Voice for the First Time: Analyzing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank for Soft Power Opportunities and Risks in the Narrative of ‘Lean, Clean and Green,’” Journal of Contemporary China 26, no. 107 (2017): 633-649. <29> Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). <30> See: Jason A. Kirk, India and the World Bank: The Politics of Aid and Influence, London: Anthem Press, 2012, especially Chapter 2, and Nagesh Prabhu, Reflective Shadows: Political Economy of World Bank Lending to India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016), Section III. <31> Press Trust of India, “World Bank panel to decide if probe needed on Amaravati capital”, The Economic Times, July 17, 2018. <32> Abdi Latif Dahir, “The growing membership of a China-led development bank challenges the IMF-World Bank orthodoxy”, Quartz Africa, May 9, 2018. <33> Ibid. <34> Liqun, “Foreword,” in note 6, p. v. <35> See note 9, 575. <36> Gideon Rachman, Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline From Obama to Trump and Beyond (New York: Other Press, 2017). <37> Shaun Breslin, “China’s Global Goals and Roles: Changing the World From Second Place?,” Asian Affairs 47, no. 1 (2016): 59-70. <38> See note 10.
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.