The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

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 have since 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 to the World Bank's. It is also a paradox as a liberal institution created by an illiberal regime.

This book offers a comprehensive explanation of the factors behind the birth and the design of the AIIB and examines the AIIB in a larger context of Chinese development finance strategies. It explains the complexity of the AIIB as a liberal international organization designed by a group of state and multilateral development bank (MDB) experts to be deeply connected to the norms, rules, and networks of global development banking, while it is also an institution created by an illiberal state whose many ways of interacting with those global norms and rules can be contradictory. Gutner shows that while the AIIB is largely cut from the same cloth as other major MDBs, it also faces similar challenges and criticism. The arguments presented advance our understanding of how institutional diffusion takes place in the system of MDBs. and are a reminder of the importance of more nuanced approaches to understand why and how China's institutional strategies show great variation.