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As part of the PLoS Medicine series on Global Health Diplomacy, Lai-Han Chan and colleagues provide a case study of China's growing engagement in global health diplomacy following the SARS epidemic.

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The existing accounts about the China-led multilateral development bankthe Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)have focused on the American policy concerns and the economic and commercial reasons for China to establish it. Two deeper questions are left unaddressed: Was there any strategic rationale for China to initiate a new multilateral development bank; and if there were, how effective is China's strategy? From a neorealist, balance-of-power perspective, this paper argues that China has felt threatened by the Obama administration's rebalance to the Asia-Pacific strategy. In response, China opts for a soft-balancing policy to carve a regional security space in Eurasia to mitigate the threat coming from its east. China's material power, premised on the fact that the country is a huge domestic market and flush with cash, has proved irresistible for Asian states, with the exception of Japan, to be enticed away from the US. On the one hand, this paper adds weight to the claim that although the US remains to be the pre-eminent military power in the Asia-Pacific, it has fallen into a relative decline in regional economic governance; on the other, China's soft balancing has its own limitations in making like-minded partnership with, and offering security guarantee to, AIIB members. A China-led regional order has yet to arrive even with the AIIB.