ALSA 2025 meeting

As a critical institutional arrangement for China’s border governance, the realization of legal equity in the border residents’ trade policy is inherently tied to the specificity of border space. From the perspective of legal geography, this paper examines the equity realization mechanisms of the policy, grounded in practices from the China-Myanmar and China-Laos border regions. Findings reveal that the policy, through differentiated rights allocation based on "border resident identity" (granting permanent residents within 0–20 kilometers of China’s land border a daily tax-free allowance of 8,000 yuan per person), is essentially a "spatial justice" response of law to the specificity of border space, aiming to bridge the development gap between border areas and inland regions.
However, in practice, the "border resident identity-border space" splice has been utilized by multiple stakeholders, with chief beneficiary gradually shifting from border residents to domestic and foreign cargo owners and other parties. This has resulted in a misalignment between legal subjects (border residents) and actual beneficiaries, triggering equity imbalances. In response, the policy promotes rebalancing through a dynamic adjustment mechanism: on the one hand, regulating market order with rigid measures such as strengthened supervision and combating smuggling; on the other hand, by using flexible methods such as moving physical transaction processes to online spaces, effectively eliminating information imbalance, thus ensuring transparency of border residents' income, compliance of market entities, and the order of national tax collection.
In summary, the legal equity of the border residents’ trade policy is essentially a dynamic outcome of interactions between space and law. Through the benign interaction between law and space, the multiple equity objectives of "increasing border residents’ income, ensuring entity compliance, and maintaining border stability" will ultimately be achieved.