Abstract: 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. Full text available here.