THE RESULT OF A WEAK DEMOCRAT POTUS THAT BOWS TO EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING THAT MOVES AND A WEAK AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY HAS ALLOWED CHINA TO CREATE THE NEW BANK AIIB OF ASIA TO RIVAL THE US BACKED WORLD BANK AND THE ASIAN DEVELOPMENT BANK FROM JAPAN–AS THE AIIB IS A PRECEDENT FOR CHINA TO EXPAND ITS GROPE IN THE ASIAN REGION

The creation of the prosaic-sounding Asian Infrastructure Investment Development Bank (AIIB) has landed the biggest blow to America’s superpower status in the post-war era.

Such is the verdict of former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, one of the West's foremost public intellectuals and a man whose voice reverberates around the corridors of the world’s chancellories.

Mr Summers has hailed the birth of the China-led institution as the moment the US lost its role as “the underwriter of the global economic system”.

“I can think of no event since Bretton Woods comparable to the combination of China’s effort to establish a major new institution and the failure of the US to persuade dozens of its traditional allies, starting with Britain, to stay out of it,” opined the former president of Harvard and one time candidate to take over the US Federal Reserve.

He is only the latest in a chorus of former Washington insiders who are heralding the Communist nation's attempts to rival US hegemony in the “soft power” stakes.

What is the AIIB?

The brain-child of Chinese premier Xi Jinping, the AIIB aims to plug chronic infrastructure gaps across Asia. With 46-founding members as it stands, the lender has been dubbed the “World Bank for Asia”, closely mimicking rival organisations such as the Japanese-led Asian Development Bank.

Principally, the bank would act as a funnel for pumping China's massive foreign exchange reserves into projects to build roads, bridges and mobile phone towers everywhere from Myanmar to Iran.

Beijing has already committed to providing at least $50bn of the $100bn capital needed to jump start the initiative.

Critics however, argue the AIIB is simply a ruse for Beijing to expand its strategic presence in the developing world.

China retorts that the international lender will bolster the financial firepower needed to address a $700bn shortfall in infrastructure investment which existing institutions cannot meet and which will provide a collective economic benefit to the world.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11519001/How-China-grew-desperate-to-conceal-its-power-from-the-world.html