Let me thank the chair and all members for welcoming me here today to communicate what happened with my experience at the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which was a traumatic, dramatic and, in my case, very patriotic moment. That's because I felt that our membership in this organization was not giving this country a single thing of tangible value that we could proudly explain to people here in our country that their membership in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank would be delivering them back home.
In the decades since Xi Jinping proposed the AIIB in 2013, AIIB has never become well known globally. What public awareness it did have was often tainted by a perceived association with the controversial and increasingly aggressive geopolitical policies of the People's Republic of China, especially the belt and road initiative.
It was in this context that I was approached to help build a profile and to shape a positive public image for AIIB. I was asked to join as the bank's global communications chief in late 2021, not long after the two Michaels were released.
Having previously served in senior capacities at public relations firms such as Edelman and Burson-Marsteller, with 16 years of Asia-Pacific experience, I was well placed to help AIIB communicate its story. However, before signing on, I had some concerns about whether the PRC government was exercising undue influence at the bank.
AIIB's published governance did allay these concerns somewhat. I was reassured by the presence of western countries on the shareholders list, including of course my own country, our country, Canada.
It didn't take me long, though, to realize after joining the bank, that the reality of power inside of AIIB does not match the rhetoric and to see how respected G7 countries like Canada, with a reputation, were brandished like trophy members to help attract western capital and to avoid hostile policy consequences from U.S. authorities in Washington.
Inside of the bank, CCP members wield power in many of the most important positions, from the top down. Mr. Jin, the president of the bank, himself a staunch CCP member and former Red Guard, often articulates Chinese government policy as if it were his own.
As the bank’s spokesperson, I advised him that he should communicate his views as the leader of a multilateral organization, and refrain from parroting the PRC government’s point of view.
Even though I was supposedly in charge of all global communications for the bank, I subsequently discovered that Mr. Jin’s office, dominated by Communist Party members, was directly involved in crafting messaging with PRC media for the domestic Chinese market that differed from what the bank was communicating in English to overseas audiences.
Devising public messaging to distinguish AIIB from the controversial BRI—which of course is Xi Jinping's signature, number one, most important geopolitical expansion project—was seen as a critical priority. That was requested of me directly by President Jin. Yet, privately these two PRC initiatives seemed uncomfortably more intertwined and interrelated than I had been led to believe.
In my own department, a CCP member—imagine this—was appointed as my personal assistant. I found out that this Communist Party member, appointed as my assistant, was secretly reporting directly to the most senior party member in Mr. Jin’s office.
This arrangement, to say the least, was outside of the bank’s supposed reporting lines. I had an in-house snitch reporting directly to Communist Party members what was going on, meaning every journalist I met with and every civil society leader I met with.
Interestingly, in 2022—I'd been there for a number of months at this point—the Communist Party presence in the president’s office at AIIB was bolstered by the arrival of a new colleague whose job description nobody seemed to know, except that he was supposed to be “the new party guy”.
Within a few months, Mr. Jin’s office suite underwent a remodelling: security locks were installed, controlling the access of all AIIB staff.
The bank's vice-presidents, none of them Chinese, needed to be buzzed into his office for the very first time, and that created a lot of resentment internally.
This cocooning of the AIIB president is consistent with how the information he receives and the issues he decides are filtered through the two CCP officials whose offices inside this bubble were closest physically to his.
Now at the AIIB, almost nothing Mr. Jin, the president, sees, says or does happens without the deep involvement of these two Communist Party officials. How do I know this? I know this because the communications department, for which I was responsible, was located right next to Mr. Jin's office.
