# Special Economic Zone A **special economic zone** is an area inside a country where business and trade rules differ from the rest of the country: lower taxes, lighter regulation, looser labor law, easier customs. The family includes free ports, free-trade zones, export-processing zones and enterprise zones. ## How the zone spread The first modern zone is usually dated to 1959, at Shannon Airport in Ireland. The model that changed the world was China's. In 1980 [[Deng Xiaoping]]'s government opened its first zone at Shenzhen, next to [[Hong Kong]] and modeled on it, as part of [[Reform and Opening Up]]. The world had 176 zones in 1986 and more than 5,400 by 2018, almost half of them in China. ## What the critics say Zones are criticized for weak labor rights (some have been compared to labor camps), for draining tax revenue, for favoring multinationals over local firms, and for attracting fraud and other illicit business. Historian Quinn Slobodian's *[[Crack-Up Capitalism]]* adds a political charge: that a generation of free-market thinkers came to see the zone as a way to keep capitalism and drop democracy. ## The zone and the network state A [[Charter City]] is a zone with more of its own law. In the words of [[Mark Lutter]], founder of the [[Charter Cities Institute]], charter cities are a subset of special economic zones. The same is true in practice of the projects on the [[Network State Experiments Roster]]: - [[Próspera]] exists under a Honduran zone law. - [[Itana]] sits inside Nigeria's Lekki Free Zone. - The [[Network School]] rented space in a Malaysian special financial zone. - [[Dubai]]'s free zones are the model several of them cite. ## Why it's on the map The zone is the ordinary, government-made thing underneath the extraordinary language of exit. Projects that claim to be founding new countries are, in law, tenants of special economic zones that a legislature created and can abolish. ## See Also - [[Canary Wharf]] — the zone brought home to Britain - [[Ciskei]] — the zone under apartheid - [[Singapore]] · [[Hong Kong]] · [[Dubai]] - [[Freedom Cities]] — the proposed American version