Guangxi advances foreign-related rule of law to boost opening-up, ASEAN cooperation

As the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership took root and the China-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement progressed toward its 3.0 version, cross-border economic and trade exchanges between China and ASEAN countries have become increasingly frequent, resulting in rising demand for foreign-related legal services. The Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, as the country's key gateway to ASEAN, is advancing foreign-related rule of law by harnessing the "three engines" of institutional innovation, scientific and technological empowerment, and talent support.

In March 2025, the core trademark of Ah Ma Handmade, a Guangxi-based tea beverage brand, was maliciously registered by a third party in Thailand. The Nanning Intellectual Property Protection Center acted swiftly, using its overseas intellectual property (IP) risk early warning and information-sharing mechanism to identify the issue.

Within 24 hours, the center contacted the company that owns the brand and assigned experienced experts specializing in Thai trademark protection to conduct on-site assessments. Using a model that combines government guidance, expert assistance, and enterprise collaboration, the center helped secure a lawful rejection of the malicious trademark application by the Thai trademark regulator, saving the company more than 1 million yuan ($149,700) in economic losses. The successful resolution of this case demonstrated the effectiveness of the center's overseas IP protection model, which integrates timely early warning, rapid response, and long-term prevention and control.

To date, the Nanning Intellectual Property Protection Center has resolved multiple overseas trademark disputes for local enterprises, preventing cumulative losses of over 40 million yuan ($5.99 million).

To address prominent challenges in foreign-related disputes, such as difficulties in ascertaining extraterritorial laws and language barriers, the Justice Department of Guangxi collaborated with Guangxi Minzu University to develop and launch the China-ASEAN Legal Consultation AI Agent in December 2025. Powered by the DeepSeek large language model and retrieval-augmented generation technology, the agent contains a database of more than 190,000 laws and regulations from ASEAN member states. It also includes bilingual translations of over 100 key commercial laws and a 3-million-character corpus of professional parallel legal texts covering seven less commonly used ASEAN languages.

In a landmark achievement in December 2025, the AI agent assisted the Nanning International Commercial Court in mediating a cross-border second-instance contract dispute involving a Vietnamese party, helping resolve a case valued at 1.48 million yuan ($221,613). In July 2026, the AI agent's upgraded 2.0 version debuted at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, attracting widespread attention from global participants.

While institutional and technological advances pave the way, progress ultimately depends on talent cultivation. In 2024, the Ministry of Education and the Government of Guangxi jointly established the China-ASEAN Law School at Guangxi Minzu University. The school has so far cultivated more than 2,000 legal professionals skilled in handling ASEAN-related affairs. Students from the law school actively participate in data collection, translation, and proofreading for the China-ASEAN Legal Consultation AI Agent, developing interdisciplinary expertise that integrates legal knowledge and science and technology through hands-on practice.

From talent cultivation to institutional innovation, Guangxi has been leveraging the rule of law to support local enterprises' global expansion and forging ahead on a new path of foreign-related rule of law development for cooperation with ASEAN.