The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and China's Strategic Course

Creating the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a multilateral development bank initiated by the People's Republic of China, has been one of the key symptoms of Xi Jinping's ambitious "China Dream" foreign policy. The previous studies mainly focused on providing a description of AIIB's creation or general motives and context through which they explicated the establishment of the Bank. Building on the literature focused on strategic culture and grand strategy, I supplement the general motives of AIIB's creation by characterizing the style and process of AIIB's materialization. I argue that the style (procedure) of AIIB's implementation largely resembles the previous Dengian model of strategic procedure which Deng himself described with the Chinese saying "crossing the river by touching the stones" which evinces flexibility and "step-by-step" characteristics in its procedure. This helps to illustrate that China's engagement with the international order can be adaptive to a significant degree and China does not necessarily follow a pre-planned vision of how to take over international (institutional) order. While China's foreign policy in some areas is often regarded as being assertive and rigidly defending its positions, AIIB is a different case to a high extent. Moreover, analyzing the creation of AIIB indicates ambiguity of Xi's foreign policy regarding general aims it wants to achieve and identities on which it should be based.