Alongside the New Development Bank and the ambitious Silk Road Fund, the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is another step towards China’s objective of establishing an Asian-centered global economic order.

With 57 nations currently approved as founding shareholders of the yet to be launched AIIB, China’s current exposure on the economic and political stage is unprecedented. As the first international development bank to be implemented outside the West, the AIIB plans to funnel hundred of billions of dollars into infrastructure projects worldwide without the bureaucratic difficulties that have come to define development practice by traditional institutions such as the World Bank.

2009 estimates by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) estimated the region needed as much as $8 trillion in investments in physical infrastructure by 2020, an amount that completely overwhelmed its own capability and that of the World Bank combined.

A suspicious China has long been frustrated by the failure of the existing international order to accommodate its rapid emergence to the global top table. A 2010 reform which would have increased the voting shares of emerging economies at the World Bank was stalled due to the permanent ability of the US to block any major change in the  governing structure. Similar reforms were blocked by Congress for the International Monetary Fund;  even the Asian Development Bank remains based in Manila but has been directed by a succession of Japanese officials.

China, a country with the largest foreign exchange reserves on the planet, is anxious to generate as much ‘soft power’ as it can through building an alternative architecture for international development financing. Not only has it proposed the AIIB, but also the New Development Bank launched with its BRICs partners Brazil, Russia, India and China,  as well as the Silk Road plan – a $40 billion fund implemented to boost trade and connectivity with their Central Asian neighbors.

Setting up this development bank is a broader initiative, one that is driven by the new role of Asia in the global economy, the perceived loss of legitimacy of traditional institutions and the objective to develop economic and political relations across the region. If China follows the structure of traditional developmental banks in terms of transparency, governance, environmental protection and energy saving, then its success will simply be a matter of time.