Bounded Ambition: The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Limits of Chinese Revisionism in Global Finance

Öz

This paper asks why the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), China’s flagship multilateral development bank, has converged so thoroughly with World Bank and Asian Development Bank templates despite Beijing’s well-documented frustration with Western-dominated financial governance. Rejecting both predictions of systemic displacement and narratives of liberal socialisation, it advances a market-discipline theory of constrained revisionism built on a four-layer causal mechanism. Dollar-system dependence compels market integration; market integration exposes new institutions to credit rating evaluation; rating criteria enforce conformity with established multilateral development bank standards; and accumulated conformity generates network lock-in that forecloses substantive deviation. The paper combines a theory-testing single-case study with a structured cross-domain comparison, operationalising the mechanism through nine indicators drawn from bond issuance, rating assessments, prudential and accounting standards, co-financing ratios, portfolio distribution and voting behaviour. Three observable implications are tested against the AIIB’s record through 2025, and the evidence is unambiguous: the dollar is fixed as the unit of account in the constitutive treaty, no parallel renminbi funding track exists, capitalisation far exceeds any rating threshold, most country-level projects are co-financed with incumbent institutions, and the veto China has held since 2016 remains unused. A comparison with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation shows that identical actor-level variables yield markedly different behaviour where market discipline is absent, confirming the argument’s domain-specificity. The paper thus specifies the constraint on rising-power revisionism precisely enough to explain cross-domain variation in Chinese institution-building, and identifies finance as the domain where structural barriers to revisionism bind most tightly.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
• Constrained Revisionism
• Market Discipline
• Credit Rating Agencies
• Structural Power

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