AIIB president selected to Time 100

Jin Liqun, president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, made his first appearance on the Time 100 list of the most influential people in the "American world".

Also representing China on this year's list, released on April 21, are President Xi Jinping, who has made the list seven times before; chemist Tu Youyou, China's first woman Nobel Prize-winner; Wang Jianlin, chairman of Dalian Wanda Group and fashion designer Guo Pei.

"With his strong personality and leadership, he is quickly forging AIIB into an effective development bank, working cooperatively with other multilateral institutions like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, showing that one can combine high-lending standards with effective development," Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote of Jin.

"Going forward, one can anticipate that AIIB will demonstrate that governance matters: With control in the hands of emerging markets, and especially China, lending will be different from that of established institutions, like the World Bank, controlled by advanced countries, and especially the US," Stiglitz said.

In an interview published in the weekend edition of the Financial Times, Jin said the bank isn't "trying to upend the international financial and economic order, even though it leaves much room for improvement."

Jin also said that although China is the bank's biggest shareholder, "it is only one shareholder and I can tell you the bank will not do anything that is driven by politics, and will not interfere in political affairs".

"Now some people are skeptical, particularly since I am a Chinese Communist party member, but let me ask you one question: If we really wanted to run this bank à la Chine, then why would we go to all this trouble [to convince Western countries to join]?"

Jin said the bank offers China an opportunity "to show it can work with other countries and to [better] international practice - not just Western practice - so people can be convinced China is a force for peace and prosperity in the world."

"The Chinese experience illustrates that infrastructure investment paves the way for broad-based economic social development, and poverty alleviation comes as a natural consequence of that," he said. "We want to create something new that combines the strong features of private companies with those of multilateral development banks."

Tom Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, praised the vital work of Tu, who also made the list for the first time.

"It is one thing to discover a folk remedy and quite another to find its medically active agent and turn it into a modern drug," Frieden said. "When boiling failed to extract an effective antimalaria ingredient from the herb, it was Tu who remembered a millennium-old recipe she'd copied in her notebook - one that called for soaking, not boiling, the herb. The ancient recipe turned out to hold the key: Tu found that the active compound, now known as artemisinin, is destroyed by high heat."

The World Health Organization has named artemisinin, "now mankind's main line of defense against malaria", an essential drug, wrote Frieden.

The Time 100 was started by the American news magazine in 1999.

Others on the list are US President Barack Obama (for the 11th time, most in list's history); Pope Francis; Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders; GOP presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz; International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde; Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his Chinese-American wife, Priscilla Chan; Apple CEO Tim Cook; actor Leonardo Di Caprio; and singer Adele.

hengweili@chinadailyusa.com