China’s Model of Multilateralism: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Xi Jinping’s Speech on Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

In the last few decades, multilateralism has faced challenges due to various global crises, such as the current Covid-19 pandemic. One of the countries that considers multilateralism as a solution to global problems is China. China's growing multilateral activism was initially perceived as China's integration and support to the current dominant global multilateral order, but there is also another view that China's multilateral participation is a threat because of its different characteristics. In its narrative, the Chinese government often emphasizes the ineffective existing multilateral institutions and international system and both need to be improved. In 2013, China initiated a multilateral development bank called the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) which is claimed as a solution to these problems. However, it is not a necessity to solve the ineffectiveness of multilateral institutions and the international system by establishing new institution. This makes the establishment of the AIIB can be seen as a social irregularity. This study aims to understand this social irregularity by analyzing President Xi Jinping's speech at the fifth annual AIIB meeting in 2020. The speech will be analyzed using the three dimensions of Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) method, the text dimension, the discursive process dimension, and the sociocultural dimension.