Belt and Road beneficiary Turkey, received a $150 million loan from AIIB last year to support a major highway, while Kazakhstan — where Xi first launched BRI in 2013 — received a $47 million loan for a major wind farm in 2019.
“China, although precluded from using the AIIB directly as a tool to fulfill its ambitious BRI agenda, is using the bank as leverage in pushing forward the BRI,” writes Yu Hong, a senior research fellow at the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore in a 2024 book on the BRI.
It is “not an exaggeration,” Yu writes, “to claim that the AIIB is intended to project China’s influence in Asia and beyond, and thereby to facilitate the BRI’s implementation.”
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“There’s quite a lot of infrastructure financing that goes through London,” said a senior British business representative with a background in finance who knows AIIB’s president. “The benefit for the AIIB is that they would probably see more international deal flow.”
The White House’s “concern will be more about the U.K. picking sides and exposure to CCP influence,” said Chatham House’s senior China research fellow Matthews. As China continues to grow in power, he adds, the U.K. “should be making decisions based on its own long-term national interest even if that causes friction with the U.S.”
Britain’s ongoing membership in the AIIB “at least allows it some influence over how the bank develops,” Matthews said. “An essential part of this is clear-eyed awareness of the nature of the Chinese Communist Party and how it projects influence, including within the AIIB, and pushing back on this where necessary.”
“The real big picture question for the U.K. is not the short-term political impact on the Labour government’s China policy versus relations with the Trump administration,” Matthews explains, “but the long-term strategic challenge of maintaining economic and geopolitical relevance in a world where China is increasingly influential.”