WITH his wavy silvery hair, relaxed demeanour, and fluent, colloquial English, Jin Liqun comes from a different mould from the one that churns out the standard senior Chinese official: raven-locked, stiff-necked, monoglot. That is perhaps one reason why China chose him to lead the team setting up its new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Another is a career that seems to prepare him ideally for the role—as an official of the finance ministry, vice president of a multilateral development bank, boss of an investment bank and chairman of a sovereign-wealth fund.
His presence alone helps explain why China has been so successful in attracting other countries to back the AIIB. Mr Jin played a leading role in overcoming suspicions about the bank—such as that, by offering less stringent lending conditions, it would threaten existing multilateral lenders, notably the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Indeed, Mr Jin’s biggest difficulty may no longer be to establish the AIIB’s credibility, but to demonstrate why, if it hews so closely to principles followed by the existing banks, China felt the need to promote it at...Continue reading
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