North Korea approached China to join the new Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) only to be summarily rebuffed by its chief economic and financial ally.A senior envoy from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) approached the presumptive inaugural president of the AIIB, Jin Liqun, probably in Beijing in February, only to be spurned, senior Chinese diplomatic sources said.
China’s message to North Korea was a straight-and-simple “no way”, the diplomat said, adding that China had asked for, and had failed to secure, a far more detailed breakdown of North Korea’s financial and economic picture, seen by the new China-led development bank as a basic first step in admitting the hermit state to its fold.
The snub came as a shock to the North Korean delegation. North Korea remains entirely absent from the global multilateral community, being a member neither of the twin Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, nor the Asian Development Bank. It saw membership of the new China-led development bank as a realistic ambition,given that China regularly and unilaterally lends money to the isolated DPRK regime in return for uranium and other mineral ores.
Others said that North Korea’s ham-fisted attempt to join the new development bank came as no real surprise. The impoverished country may rattle its sabre at the outside world, but it also cares about its standing in the global community, and is in dire need of capital to rebuild its crumbling infrastructure.