When Ji Peiding, deputy director of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), delivered a speech at the Chinese Institute of International Affairs on May 31.

He revealed that the NPC is currently considering drafting a law related to land boundary. His speech was given in English and touched on the topic of "Foreign Affairs and the National Interest."

Ji indicated that at present, NPC is thinking of drafting a "Land Boundary Law." Asked whether such law will cover the issues of China-India, China-Vietnam and China-Russia borderlines, Ji gave an affirmative answer, but did not disclosed elaborate and emphasized that NPC is deliberating over related issues.

It has been a long time since the proposal of land boundary legislation was submitted. As early as when the NPC and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference were convened in 2002, 96 representatives had submitted a joint proposal to draft up a land boundary (border) law as soon as possible.

The proposal stated that as China's land boundary is over 20,000km in length, the country is urgently in need of working out a land boundary (border) law as a legal basis to settle related problems.

Lack of a land boundary (border) law will be disadvantageous for handling emergencies, cracking down cross-border crimes and for frontier defense officers and soldiers to deal with border-related issues.

China, which borders 14 countries with a 22,000km land boundary, is the country with the longest land boundary and most neighboring countries and one of the countries facing the most complicated boundary situations in the world. As of end 2004, approximately 90% of China's total boundary line had been delimited.

At present, a pending problem is the negotiation on the borderline between China and India. The China-India borderline is about 2,000km long and has never been officially delimited.

Both parties had a dispute over about 125,000 sq km of land. In 2003, premiers of both countries assigned special delegates to discuss and explore a framework for solving their borderline dispute from the overall political perspective of the relationship between both countries.

After 5 rounds of talks, the special delegates from both parties finally came to a consensus for the "Agreement on the Political Parameters and Guiding Principles for the Settlement of the India-China Boundary Question."