Abstract:Regional collaborative legislation is a highly innovative local legislative system within China’s legislative framework. The revised Article 83 of the “Legislation Law” in 2023 establishes the regional collaborative legislative system, fundamentally addressing the legitimacy issues in the practice of regional collaborative legislation. However, many ambiguities within the system remain unaddressed. Therefore, it’s necessary to discuss the normative attributes, legal boundaries, and conflict resolution of regional collaborative legislation through the lens of legislative jurisprudence and in the context of China’s regional collaborative legislative practices. As a novel type of local legislation, regional collaborative legislation possesses unique normative attributes. On the one hand, it aims to fulfill the needs of regional coordinated development and represents a specialized exercise of local legislative power. On the other hand, regional collaborative regulations should be categorized as local regulations within the legal hierarchy, equal in status to other local laws, while also embodying cross-regional characteristics, notably in terms of both the cross-regional nature of the issues it addresses and the spatial efficacy of its norms. The legislative powers in regional collaboration must adhere to certain principled legal boundaries: it must not contravene constitutional provisions or encroach upon legally reserved matters, exceed the necessities of coordinated regional development reforms, or extend beyond the designated geographic scope of the regions involved. This framework operates on several levels: on a macro level, the power of regional collaborative legislation should be guided fundamentally by regional coordinated development policies and should uphold the principle of legal unity; at a meso level, it should be confined to the needs of specific collaborative projects; and on a micro level, it should satisfy basic requirements of alignment between cross-regional affairs and the administrative divisions of the legislative bodies involved. These boundaries remain principled and baseline since the precise scope of regional legislative powers depends significantly on the practical explorations of regional coordination strategies and cannot be clearly delineated by enumerative lists. Furthermore, the regional collaborative legislative powers held by municipalities should adhere to these principles, limited to areas such as “urban and rural construction and management, ecological civilization construction, historical and cultural protection, and grassroots governance”. In terms of the legal application of regional collaborative regulations and general local regulations, the principle of “special laws take precedence over general laws” holds the highest priority. The principle of “agreements must be honored” and the principle of administrative good faith can provide supporting grounds for the precedence of regional collaborative regulations. When the two involve special circumstances requiring adjudication on legislative validity, the decision shall be made by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress.Additionally, in cases involving special circumstances of legislative effectiveness adjudication, it should be decided by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. Furthermore, when collaborative legislative authority cannot meet the legislative needs of regional coordinated development reforms, it can be considered to empower regional collaborative legislation through authorization legislation by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress.