What is the desirable ratio between the number of standalone projects and cofinancing projects? Are you going to provide financing to projects outside of the Chinese government's priorities, such as the Belt and Road Initiative?
I'm going to get a Japanese national to serve in a very senior position in our bank. Recently your senior officials came to see me, looking for possible cooperation. I believe we can work together to promote development in Asia. We don't have a fixed target with regard to the ratio of standalone projects vis-a-vis cofinancing. We will take in projects that meet our standards.
Probably in the future, there will clearly be a higher proportion of cofinancing projects. When it comes to huge infrastructure projects, it's easy to go over $1 billion, it's not really a great idea for one institution to single-handedly manage the finances of a project.
But also, just because we are a little bit different from the existing institutions, we do not take poverty reduction as a direct objective. Poverty reduction will be a derivative of our efforts, so our focus will be a little bit different.
Some of the projects that cannot be done by some other institutions will be perfectly all right for us to finance. So I also think we could have a clearly greater proportion of free-standing projects, particularly after we have recruited all our operational staff in the next couple of years.
When you recruit people, you really have to be more or less sure if he or she will be a good team worker, if he or she will be working very well and would achieve very high success by working at this institution.
Imagine that you were in the middle of a board meeting, and I were a board member from Thailand, and my first question to you as a CEO of the AIIB would be: Mr CEO, we seem to have a brand image problem. If we are launching a product, people may think this product is Chinese, it's not international. The No 1 question to the CEO is: how do you plan to correct this brand image?
We have heard very critical comments on China's initiative. We never, ever, engage in any vocal arguments with these people because it's not worth it. In my view, trust has to be earned. Credibility has to be earned. You cannot talk people into belief. You can exhaust all the nice words in any dictionary and you still fail to convince these people. Just forget about it. Do your job.
If we have a project to upgrade a slumin a country in the ASEAN, do you think this is a Chinese project? We cleanup the dirty water. We provide safe drinking water. We provide electricity to low-income people. When we finance a project in South Asian countries, improving the power transmission system and contributing to the reduction of global warming, do you think this is a Chinese project? None of the projects are Chinese projects. All of these projects, I would say, are benefiting the local people.
China does not want to borrow from this bank. It doesn't make sense for China to start this bank and borrow massively from this bank. India can borrow, India is No 2. China does not want to borrow ... even though China has 30 percent of the bank's shares, contributing 30 percent of the $100 billion. China will also contribute $50 billion as a donation to this bank to establish a special fund.
You may remember President Xi Jinping said that in the last three decades, China has benefited from the general support of the World Bank, the ADB and all the bilateral sources, and now it's China's turn to contribute. That is the basic idea or principle of this institution.
So our first batch of projects will speak volumes for the basic principle of this institution. With the goal of public institutions, combined with the efficiency of private sector companies, we are going to serve as a new role model. That's why we do not want to clone any existing institution. We want to be a new entity with the strong features of private sector companies and public sector companies. That is why we believe this bank is so attractive.
