A New Era of Multilateralism: China’s Evolving Role

The 2026 Annual Meetings arrive at a moment when the central question facing the multilateral system is one of burden-sharing. Traditional donors are retrenching: aid budgets across the G7 are falling in real terms, the United States has stepped back from institutions including the WHO, and major replenishments are landing below expectations. Financial pressures have intensified even as governance reform has stalled, with successive shareholder reviews — including the 2025 IBRD review — concluding without realignment.

Against this backdrop, the role of China is under-examined. China's position is one of tension: it continues to describe itself as a developing country and a member of the Global South, yet stands on the cusp of graduation to high-income status; and it remains both a borrower from, and recipient within, the multilateral institutions it increasingly helps to fund. China has sharply increased its concessional contributions to the World Bank's IDA — rising from 28th- to 5th-largest donor in a decade — yet its formal voice and shareholding in the World Bank remain largely static, and its voluntary contributions to other multilateral bodies have plateaued over the last five years. In parallel, China continues to advance alternative platforms of its own, including the AIIB, the NDB and the newly agreed SCO Development Bank. The tension is perhaps sharpest on climate, where China's multilateral contributions effectively count toward collective international climate targets under the post-COP29 framework, even as it resists binding commitments and treats its contributions as voluntary. With the US retreating from the climate agenda, China's weight as funder, shareholder and agenda-setter is increasingly decisive.

This session will present new CGD research mapping China's engagement across the multilateral development banks, the vertical funds and the UN system — the first comprehensive update to the landmark 2021 CGD study led by Scott Morris in five years — and will use it as a shared factual baseline for a panel discussion bringing together Chinese and non-Chinese perspectives. The aim is to explore what China's shifting willingness and ability to contribute mean for burden-sharing and governance reform, including for replenishments, the reform of voice and shareholding, and the future financing of a system under fiscal strain. Convening this conversation in Bangkok offers a rare opportunity for genuine dialogue with China on its multilateral role, rather than a Western conversation about it.

• Where, and through which channels, does China now contribute to the multilateral system — and where are its notable absences? What explains the pattern of selectivity in its engagement? 
• What would meaningful reform of voice and shareholding in MDBs look like from Beijing's perspective, and from that of traditional shareholders and borrowing members? What, if any, is the space for compromise? 
• What does the growth of China-led platforms — the AIIB, the NDB and the SCO Development Bank — mean for the legacy Bretton Woods institutions? Are these complements, competitors, or both? 
• On climate finance, how should China's rising multilateral contributions be recognized within collective international goals? 
• As China's economic weight grows, how should its willingness and ability to contribute be assessed against expectations of burden-sharing, particularly amid retrenchment by traditional donors?

Presenter 

Beata Cichocka, Lead Author, CGD China & Multilaterals Research & Policy Analyst, CGD

Panelists

Yu Ye, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for World Economy Studies, Shanghai Institutes of International Studies

Additional speakers to be announced 

Moderator  

Ian Mitchell, Senior Fellow, CGD