China Puts a Special Economic Zones Plan on the BRICS Table

FTZ News: On Sept. 13 in New Delhi, at the second sitting of the 18th BRICS summit, Xi Jinping made an offer. China’s foreign ministry put the English down as follows: a BRICS special economic zone partnership; an intelligent portal; policy coordination; a new frontier for opening up. He also said China would host a services-trade forum next year.

That is Beijing talking. The room did not adopt it as a group decision. The same paragraph names no start date and no joint budget. It also says nothing about tariffs. Open-source AI and a digital-industry cloud got their own headings later in the speech. They were not folded into the zone text.

None of this arrived from nowhere. After Kazan in 2024 China began talking about a BRICS zone-cooperation center in Hangzhou and about swapping notes on how zones are run. Russia last year produced a digital map of members’ zones. A BRICS paper on the subject has been circulating since 2024. New Delhi is another lap of that circuit.

The ministry said “coordinate policies.” It did not set out tariff preferences, rules of origin or a common customs regime. Investment is the name of the second initiative — the umbrella — not an annex on duty rates. Read past that sentence and you are interpreting. Say so.

The zones themselves do not match. China has been in the export-enclave business for decades. India, Russia, Brazil and South Africa each wrote different statutes. So did the newer members, among them Iran, Egypt, the UAE, Indonesia and Ethiopia. BRICS documents describe that spread. National reports do too. Wiring them to one portal leaves each country’s clearance law where it was.

Some zones grew where a port, a workable rule and a buyer lined up. Others never became much more than a tax break behind a fence. How any one member’s parks performed is a separate file. This column is not the place to hang that grade on Xi’s sentence.

There is a smaller job the idea might still do. If the portal is a live directory — reliefs, land, a name to ring — Russia’s 2025 map and the Hangzhou meetings already showed that kind of listing can save a firm a week of hunting. That is a directory. It is not a market.

Moving cargo under shared origin rules, with one place to argue when a crate is stuck, would take a different instrument. Sept. 13 does not describe one. There is little need to speculate about intent. The proposal leaves those questions unanswered.

India chairs BRICS this year. China takes the gavel in 2027. If a shared portal is ever built, someone will have to decide where the servers sit, who sees the data and which standard wins. That argument, if it comes, will show up in a communiqué. Until a capital puts an answer on paper, leave the capitals out of it.

Sanctions and tight banking rules already slow money that is supposed to travel through a club of states. Whether the club turns the zone talk into something a truck can use remains ahead of the papers now in circulation./.


photo: bloomberg