While China has dramatically curtailed its bilateral development financing in Africa and other regions around the world, Beijing is increasing its engagement in multilateral and regional development banks around the world, including the African Development Bank among others.
This points to an important, yet little understood trend about China’s growing influence in international financial institutions.
Two reports have come out recently, one from the Center for Global Development and the other from the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), that explore China’s role in these multilateral institutions. Yunnan Chen, a senior research officer at ODI and a co-author of the ODI analysis on the issue, joins Eric & Cobus to discuss how Beijing is turning to these institutions “to pursue its geopolitical agenda and to promote alternate norms of global governance.”
Show Notes:
- Overseas Development Institute: China in the multilateral development banks: evolving strategies of a new power by Yunnan Chen and Chris Humphrey:
- Center for Global Development: Mapping China’s Rise in the Multilateral System by Scott Morris, Rowan Rockafellow and Sarah Rose
Yunnan Chen is a Senior Research Officer in the Development and Public Finance program. Her research interests center around development finance institutions and infrastructure finance in the Africa region, and she is a specialist on China’s overseas development finance. She has a background in political economy and development studies, and she is a PhD Candidate at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she conducted extensive field research with the SAIS China Africa Research Initiative.
Transcript: (please note this transcript is produced by artificial intelligence so it’s not 100% accurate)
