A special economic zone is a demarcated area inside a country where business and trade rules differ from those in force across the rest of the national territory — duty-free imports, tax holidays, streamlined customs, and often lighter regulation — offered to attract foreign investment and export manufacturing. Pioneered as free ports and then as export processing zones in the mid-twentieth century, and made famous by China's coastal zones after 1980, the model has since spread to thousands of sites worldwide.
Ship a bale of cotton into a special economic zone and, in the eyes of the customs service, it has not arrived. The crate sits on national soil, well inside the national border, watched by national police. Legally it is still abroad. No duty is owed until the cloth leaves the zone for the domestic market, and if it leaves as a finished shirt bound for a foreign buyer, no duty is ever owed at all. That legal fiction is the device at the center of the whole arrangement. A state that wants foreign factories does not have to rewrite its laws. It only has to declare a patch of ground where some of them do not reach. The fence is not there to keep the goods in. It marks where the country's own rules stop.