Bob Pickard, until recently head of international communications at the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in Beijing, has resigned and left China in a hurry. “The bank is dominated by members of the Communist Party,” Pickard writes on Twitter. “I saw with my own eyes how Communist party bosses occupy key positions in the bank, like an internal KGB or Gestapo or Stazi,” he adds.
At the same time, the Canadian government has frozen ties with the bank, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced on Wednesday. There will be an investigation into ties with the Communist Party of China (CCP). That investigation could lead to Canada’s full withdrawal from the bank.
China founded the AIIB in 2016 as an international alternative to the Asian Development Bank (ADB). The bank focuses on international infrastructure projects and emphatically wants to be an international institution. China founded the bank partly out of dissatisfaction with China’s limited position of power in the ADB, a comparable institution in which the US and Japan together play a dominant role with more than a quarter of the shares. The director of that bank was always Japanese.
The AIIB is based in Beijing, the top boss is the banker and former deputy finance minister Jin Liqun. He, like all other high-level administrators in China, is a member of the CCP. In addition to China, more than a hundred countries are participating, including the Netherlands and Canada. Japan and the United States have not become members, partly because of doubts about the form of government.
Fled to Tokyo
Pickard says he fled to Tokyo on Wednesday because he feared for his own safety. That was after he expressed concern about what he described as the CCP’s infiltration of the bank. He also writes on Twitter that “as a patriotic Canadian” he had no choice but to leave Beijing.
Referring to the CCP, he said against the Financial Times in Tokyo: “Those people are like an invisible government within the bank, and I can’t be a part of that,” said Pickard. “I don’t want to be a useful idiot.” He worked for the bank for 15 months.
“Recent public comments and the Bank’s characterization are unfounded and disappointing,” the bank said in a statement. “We are proud of our multilateral mission and have a diverse international team.”
It is plausible that the CCP does indeed play an (increasingly dominant) role within the bank. On the instructions of the CCP, this is the case with all Chinese companies and institutions. Moreover, in the case of the AIIB, it is a bank that is important as a Chinese experiment in establishing credible international institutions and is therefore being watched even more closely by the CCP.
Against American dominance
The CCP believes that many international organizations are overly dominated by the US and other Western players. It is not so much international as Western norms and values that dominate.
The CCP wants to put an end to this dominance and is pursuing a two-track policy to this end. On the one hand, the CCP is committed to increasing Chinese influence in organizations such as the United Nations. The idea is that the UN bodies vote more often with China and less often with what China calls “a small, outdated club of Western countries that still wants to call the shots”.
In addition, China is establishing new international bodies like the AIIB, and is putting plans into action like the New Silk Road, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), to increase its international influence. In China, the state is increasingly merging with the CCP, and with a bank like the AIIB, the CCP’s international policy influence is also increasing.
Western countries that participate in a bank such as the AIIB may end up cutting their fingers, no matter how good the projects themselves may be. They contribute to the spread of international systems of governance that are devised and dominated by the CCP.