TaiShang
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AIIB这一机构的性质主要是与美国和日本主导的世界银行、亚洲开发银行(ADB)相抗衡，由中国主导成立。中国计划持有50%的股份，因此中国主张总部也应设立在中国境内。但是，韩国政府强调AIIB是国际机构，一直都在说服中国。韩国认为，若AIIB总部设在韩国，美国、日本等西方国家担心中国会控制这一机构的忧虑也会得到缓解。韩国政府积极推进AIIB总部落户韩国的原因是因为不管从名还是从利来看，都没有损失。AIIB资本金达1000亿美元，是与ADB（1650亿美元）不相上下的超大型国际金融机构。如果韩国能成为其总部落户地，那么韩国在国际金融秩序中的地位也将大幅提高。
China is to hold 50% of the shares.
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中国为什么在亚洲创立新的“世界银行”
Why China is creating a new "World Bank" for Asia
TO THE alphabet soup of international development banks (ADB, AfDB, CAF, EBRD, IADB), add one more set of initials: AIIB, or for the uninitiated, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. On October 24th, representatives from 21 Asian nations (pictured above) signed an agreement to establish the AIIB, which, as its name suggests, will lend money to build roads, mobile phone towers and other forms of infrastructure in poorer parts of Asia. China spearheaded the bank and hopes to formally launch it by the end of next year. More money for critical projects might seem unambiguously good, but the AIIB has stoked controversy because Asia already has a multilateral lender, the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Why is China creating a new development bank for Asia?
国际发展银行的缩略语（ADB亚洲发展银行，AfDB非洲发展银行，CAF拉美开发银行，EBRD欧洲复兴发展银行，IADB泛美开发银行）构成的字母汤中又多了一位新成员：AIIB亚洲基础设施投资银行。十月24日，21个亚洲国家代表签署协议成立AIIB，AIIB将向亚洲较贫穷地区借款修建道路、移动电话塔等基础设施。AIIB由中国带头发起，中国希望到明年正式启动该银行。关键项目得到更多投资无疑是件好事，但亚洲已有一个多边货款机构ADB亚洲开发银行，AIIB的成位引发了争议。中国为什么要在亚洲创建新的发展银行呢？
China’s official answer is that Asia has a massive infrastructure funding gap. The ADB has pegged the hole at some $8 trillion between 2010 and 2020. Existing institutions cannot hope to fill it: the ADB has a capital base (money both paid-in and pledged by member nations) of just over $160 billion and the World Bank has $223 billion. The AIIB will start with $50 billion in capital—hardly enough for what is needed but still a helpful boost. Moreover, while ADB and World Bank loans support everything from environmental protection to gender equality, the AIIB will concentrate its firepower on infrastructure. Officially at least, ADB and World Bank officials have extended a cautious welcome to the new China-led bank, saying they see room for collaboration.
中国官方答复是，亚洲存在巨大的基础设施资金缺口。ADB（亚洲开发银行）认为从2010年到2020年资金缺口达8万亿美元左右。现存机构都无法弥补这一缺口：ADB的资本基础（由成员国已缴的和承诺的资金构成）仅略高于1600亿美元，世界银行的资本基础为2230亿美元。AIIB初始资本基础为500亿美元，这远不能弥补亚洲基础设施资金缺口，但仍是一项有益的补充。ADB和世界银行的货款项目从环境保护到男女平等无不支持，而AIIB则专注于基础设施。至少就官员态度而言，ADB和世界银行已向这一由中国领导的新银行表示了谨慎的欢迎，称双方有一定的合作空间。
Behind the scenes, though, the Chinese initiative has set off a heated diplomatic battle. America has lobbied allies not to join the AIIB, while Jin Liqun, the Chinese official who will head the bank, has shuttled between countries to persuade them to sign up. At the bank’s inauguration ceremony, Australia, Indonesia and South Korea were conspicuously absent. In public, the concern cited by America and some of the hold-outs has been a lack of clarity about AIIB’s governance. Critics warn that the China-led bank may fail to live up to the environmental, labour and procurement standards that are essential to the mission of development lenders. However, China has insisted that AIIB will be rigorous in adopting the best practices of institutions such as the World Bank. Given that the bank will be placed under such a close microscope, there is good reason to believe China on this.
而私底下，中国成立AIIB的计划已引发了激烈的外交战。美国游说其盟友不要加入AIIB，而即将出任AIIB行长的中国官员金产群则穿梭于各国之间说服各国签字加入。在AIIB成立典礼上，美国、印尼、韩国三国缺席，引人注目。美国公开表达的担忧和一些坚持的观点是：AIIB的管理并不透明。批评人士称中国领导的AIIB可能达不到环境、人力和采购标准，而这些对发展银行的使命来说至关重要。然而中国坚称AIIB将严格遵循诸如世界银行等机构的最佳做法。鉴于AIIB会处于世界的密切关注之下，我们有理由相信中国能说到做到。
But the real, unstated tension stems from a deeper shift: China will use the new bank to expand its influence at the expense of America and Japan, Asia's established powers. China’s decision to fund a new multilateral bank rather than give more to existing ones reflects its exasperation with the glacial pace of global economic governance reform. The same motivation lies behind the New Development Bank established by the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Although China is the biggest economy in Asia, the ADB is dominated by Japan; Japan’s voting share is more than twice China’s and the bank’s president has always been Japanese. Reforms to give China a little more say at the International Monetary Fund have been delayed for years, and even if they go through America will still retain far more power. China is, understandably, impatient for change. It is therefore taking matters into its own hands.
但是，真正而未被说透的紧张来自于当前形势深层次的转变：中国将以牺牲亚洲既有势力美国和日本的利益为代
价，利用新银行AIIB扩展影响力。中国出资设立新的多边银行，而非把资金投入既有银行之中，这一决定表明了中国对全球经济管理改革缓慢进程的不满。也正是这种不满，促使中国与其他金砖国家成员创建新的发展银行。尽管中国是亚洲第一大经济体， ADB却由日本主导，日本在ADB的投票权二倍于中国，ADB主席往往由日本人担任。IMF（国际货币基金组织）略微增加中国话语权的改革已拖延数年而不实行，而且就算实行改革，美国仍将保留远多于中国的权力。因此也就不难理解，中国已对现行国际机构的改变失去了耐心，中国要自己掌控主动权
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Landscape of U.S. Failure: Financial Collapse Leads to War | Global Research
Scanning the headlines in the western mainstream press, and then peering behind the one-way mirror to compare that to the actual goings-on, one can’t but get the impression that America’s propagandists, and all those who follow in their wake, are struggling with all their might to concoct rationales for military action of one sort or another, be it supplying weapons to the largely defunct Ukrainian military, or staging parades of US military hardware and troops in the almost completely Russian town of Narva, in Estonia, a few hundred meters away from the Russian border, or putting US “advisers” in harm’s way in parts of Iraq mostly controlled by Islamic militants.
The strenuous efforts to whip up Cold War-like hysteria in the face of an otherwise preoccupied and essentially passive Russia seems out of all proportion to the actual military threat Russia poses. (Yes, volunteers and ammo do filter into Ukraine across the Russian border, but that’s about it.) Further south, the efforts to topple the government of Syria by aiding and arming Islamist radicals seem to be backfiring nicely. But that’s the pattern, isn’t it? What US military involvement in recent memory hasn’t resulted in a fiasco? Maybe failure is not just an option, but more of a requirement?
Let’s review. Afghanistan, after the longest military campaign in US history, is being handed back to the Taliban. Iraq no longer exists as a sovereign nation, but has fractured into three pieces, one of them controlled by radical Islamists. Egypt has been democratically reformed into a military dictatorship. Libya is a defunct state in the middle of a civil war. The Ukraine will soon be in a similar state; it has been reduced to pauper status in record time—less than a year. A recent government overthrow has caused Yemen to stop being US-friendly. Closer to home, things are going so well in the US-dominated Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador that they have produced a flood of refugees, all trying to get into the US in the hopes of finding any sort of sanctuary.
Looking at this broad landscape of failure, there are two ways to interpret it. One is that the US officialdom is the most incompetent one imaginable, and can’t ever get anything right. But another is that they do not succeed for a distinctly different reason: they don’t succeed because results don’t matter. You see, if failure were a problem, then there would be some sort of pressure coming from somewhere or other within the establishment, and that pressure to succeed might sporadically give rise to improved performance, leading to at least a few instances of success. But if in fact failure is no problem at all, and if instead there was some sort of pressure to fail, then we would see exactly what we do see.
In fact, a point can be made that it is the limited scope of failure that is the problem. This would explain the recent saber-rattling in the direction of Russia, accusing it of imperial ambitions (Russia is not interested in territorial gains), demonizing Vladimir Putin (who is effective and popular) and behaving provocatively along Russia’s various borders (leaving Russia vaguely insulted but generally unconcerned). It can be argued that all the previous victims of US foreign policy—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, even the Ukraine—are too small to produce failure writ large enough to satisfy America’s appetite for failure. Russia, on the other hand, especially when incentivized by thinking that it is standing up to some sort of new, American-style fascism, has the ability to deliver to the US a foreign policy failure that will dwarf all the previous ones.
Analysts have proposed a variety of explanations for America’s hyperactive, oversized militarism. Here are the top three:
1. The US government has been captured by the military-industrial complex, which demands to be financed lavishly. Rationales are created artificially to achieve that result. But there does seem to be some sort of pressure to actually make weapons and field armies, because wouldn’t it be far more cost-effective to achieve full-spectrum failure simply by stealing all the money and skip building the weapons systems altogether? So something else must be going on.
2. The US military posture is designed to insure America’s full spectrum dominance over the entire planet. But “full-spectrum dominance” sounds a little bit like “success,” whereas what we see is full-spectrum failure. Again, this story doesn’t fit the facts.
3. The US acts militarily to defend the status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency. But the US dollar is slowly but surely losing its attractiveness as a reserve currency, as witnessed by China and Russia acting as swiftly as they can to unload their US dollar reserves, and to stockpile gold instead. Numerous other nations have entered into arrangements with each other to stop using the US dollar in international trade. The fact of the matter is, it doesn’t take a huge military to flush one’s national currency down the toilet, so, once again, something else must be going on.
There are many other explanations on offer as well, but none of them explain the fact that the goal of all this militarism seems to be to achieve failure.
Perhaps a simpler explanation would suffice? How about this one:
The US has surrendered its sovereignty to a clique of financial oligarchs. Having nobody at all to answer to, this American (and to some extent international) oligarchy has been ruining the financial condition of the country, running up staggering levels of debt, destroying savings and retirements, debasing the currency and so on. The inevitable end-game is that the Federal Reserve (along with the central banks of other “developed economies”) will end up buying up all the sovereign debt issuance with money they print for that purpose, and in the end this inevitably leads to hyperinflation and national bankruptcy. A very special set of conditions has prevented these two events from taking place thus far, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t, because that’s what always happens, sooner or later.
Now, let’s suppose a financial oligarchy has seized control of the country, and, since it can’t control its own appetites, is running it into the ground. Then it would make sense for it to have some sort of back-up plan for when the whole financial house of cards falls apart. Ideally, this plan would effectively put down any chance of revolt of the downtrodden masses, and allow the oligarchy to maintain security and hold onto its wealth. Peacetime is fine for as long as it can placate the populace with bread and circuses, but when a financial calamity causes the economy to crater and bread and circuses turn scarce, a handy fallback is war.
Any rationale for war will do, be it terrorists foreign and domestic, Big Bad Russia, or hallucinated space aliens. Military success is unimportant, because failure is even better than success for maintaining order because it makes it possible to force through various emergency security measures. Various training runs, such as the military occupation of Boston following the staged bombings at the Boston Marathon, have already taken place. The surveillance infrastructure and the partially privatized prison-industrial complex are already in place for locking up the undesirables. A really huge failure would provide the best rationale for putting the economy on a war footing, imposing martial law, suppressing dissent, outlawing “extremist” political activity and so on.
And so perhaps that is what we should expect. Financial collapse is already baked in, and it’s only a matter of time before it happens, and precipitates commercial collapse when global supply chains stop functioning. Political collapse will be resisted, and the way it will be resisted is by starting as many wars as possible, to produce a vast backdrop of failure to serve as a rationale for all sorts of “emergency measures,” all of which will have just one aim: to suppress rebellion and to keep the oligarchy in power. Outside the US, it will look like Americans blowing things up: countries, things, innocent bystanders, even themselves (because, you know, apparently that works too). From the outside looking into America’s hall of one-way mirrors, it will look like a country gone mad; but then it already looks that way. And inside the hall of one-way mirrors it will look like valiant defenders of liberty battling implacable foes around the world. Most people will remain docile and just wave their little flags.
But I would venture to guess that at some point failure will translate into meta-failure: America will fail even at failing. I hope that there is something we can do to help this meta-failure of failure happen sooner rather than later.
