This is evidence of China’s willingness and capacity for economic leadership among a swathe of countries from South Korea to Portugal. While the bank is only one part of China’s broader One Belt, One Road initiative, this economic heavyweight’s experiment with building an open, multilateral institution needs to be encouraged.

Chairing a meeting of China’s most important economic policymakers in February, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared that the ‘primary task of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is to provide capital’ for its Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road initiatives. While ‘One Belt, One Road’ sounds like a clunky foreign policy slogan, it is in fact a comprehensive foreign economic proposal of which the AIIB is only one small part.

The substance of the proposal is laid out in an action plan jointly released in March by China’s most important economic ministry — the National Development and Reform Commission — and the ministries of foreign affairs and of commerce. It invokes an ancient time when the peoples of Africa, Asia and Europe traded in the spirit of ‘peace and cooperation’. It rests on five declared principles: upholding the United Nations’ Charter, openness, harmony, market principles and mutual benefit.

Importantly, openness means that the initiative isn’t limited to countries on the historical Silk Road. The commitment to uphold the ‘decisive role of the market in resource allocation’ is a direct extension of China’s domestic economic reform agenda. Following these principles, specific initiatives under this proposal fall into five categories. These international linkages feed back into the economic development strategies for all regions of China.

The AIIB is one of China’s many Silk Road financial integration initiatives. In the 12 months since its initial proposal in Jakarta in October 2013, China attracted 21 other countries to sign up to a memorandum of understanding with the bank. In the following six months, its numbers more than doubled when it opened to non-regional members. Fifty countries had signed the articles of agreement for the new bank in Beijing by June, with seven still to complete domestic formalities.

The only country apparently rebuffed from the AIIB is China’s fraternal Communist partner, North Korea, which is apparently not sufficiently transparent about the state of its own economy. Even Taiwan is welcome under an acceptable name, though not as a founding member.

The proposal resonates with more recent history too. Faced with the economic reconstruction of Afghanistan in 2011, then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called also for ‘a new Silk Road’ to ‘bind together a region too long torn apart by conflict and division’. While that initiative specifically focused on Central and South Asia, the call for integration in energy, trade, transport, customs, border operations, business and people-to-people links complements China’s later proposals. Indeed a US State Department spokesperson said in October 2013 that Xi Jinping’s initiatives ‘mirror our own thinking on the New Silk Road’.

Nevertheless, the United States and Japan both chose not to become founding members of the bank. This was driven partly by concerns that the AIIB would undermine the lending standards of the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, which these powers have traditionally led. But despite early lobbying from the United States, key allies — including Australia, South Korea and the United Kingdom — eventually joined the rush to the new institution. And the United States has pledged to ‘engage directly with China’ to help the AIIB implement the high-quality standards it seeks.

But the multilateral route isn’t China’s only choice in financing its Silk Road initiatives. At a high-level economic policy meeting in November devoted to the Silk Road, Xi Jinping announced the creation of China’s own Silk Road Fund. This US$40 billion fund, financed from China’s foreign exchange reserves, isn’t subject to the same multilateral oversight as the AIIB. By April it had made its inaugural US$1.65 billion investment in Pakistan. The BRICS’ New Development Bank, launched in July, offers China another option to fund Silk Road investments. The five member bank will ‘explore innovations in governance models’, probably without too much reference to high international standards, while bilaterally, Russia and China are also ‘exploring novel financial cooperation’.

China has explicitly committed to ‘shouldering more responsibilities and obligations within its capabilities’. The Silk Road initiatives indicate the scope of China’s present leadership ambitions and capabilities. Founding the AIIB is one part of this. But experimenting with an open, multilateral institution isn’t the only route Beijing is exploring. That’s why those who would like to see China contribute to solutions consistent with the present global order would be well advised to nurture China’s leadership in the AIIB.

Paul Hubbard is a Sir Roland Wilson PhD Scholar at the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University, a visiting scholar at the National School of Development, Peking University and a former Fulbright Scholar in international relations. He is on leave from the Australian Treasury. These are his personal views and do not reflect those of the Treasury.