On a State visit to Indonesia in October 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed the
establishment of a new multilateral bank, focused on the development of infrastructure in Asia. Just
over a year later, after five formal consultation meetings with interested parties, 21 Asian countries
signed a memorandum of understanding supporting the establishment of the bank on 24 October
2014. Nine months after that, following five chief negotiators’ meetings, the articles of agreement
for the bank were signed in Beijing by Finance Ministers or their representatives. Over that time the
number of prospective founding members of the bank had almost tripled to 57 (Figure 1). To date1
53 countries have signed the Articles of Agreement (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank Interim
Multilateral Secretariat 2015c). The AIIB is scheduled to become operational before 2016. While fast,
this time frame is comparable to the gestation of the ADB, which was designed between 1963 and
1965, and launched in August 1966 a little more than a year after United States President Johnson
adopted the proposal (Dutt 2001).