Despite the long-standing debate on the rise of China, there has been relatively little attention to the country’s status concerns. This article therefore examines how China sought an enhanced international status by looking into the illustrative case of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). To this end, it employs the social identity theory (SIT) framework applied to international relations (IR), in conjunction with additional insights into institutional innovation. In the IR context, SIT posits that an aspiring state resorts predominantly to one of the three status-seeking strategies—social mobility, social competition and social creativity, i.e., emulating or competing with established powers, or attempting to achieve prestige on a new dimension. As to institutional innovation, it is introduced as a construct to understand the crystallisation of social creativity in the AIIB. By virtue of analysing primary sources and secondary literature, the research at hand finds that in the case of the AIIB China adopted largely, albeit not exclusively, the social creativity strategy to mitigate the doubt of the West and boost the legitimacy of the bank. Specifically, Beijing followed the relevant rules of the game in the institution-building process and presented as a legitimate addition the quintessential status-seeking initiative—partly born out of exasperations with the existing architecture. The case study on such a noteworthy institution-building effort can shed light on the underlying rationales and wider implications of similar China-backed structures and, relatedly, the strategic thinking of the Chinese leadership to seek a greater international status.