GOVERNANCE-BASED INSTITUTIONAL REALISATION: SILENT COMPLIANCE IN CHINA’S SOUTHWEST BORDERLANDS

Abstract

This article develops an institutional account of how internationally recognised social, cultural and socioeconomic interests acquire practical effect through domestic governance in China’s southwest borderlands. It identifies governance-based institutional realisation as the production of normatively relevant conditions through domestically generated programmes and administrative institutions rather than individualised legal claims. Silent compliance is narrower: independently established domestic performance satisfies the applicable legal qualifiers of a specified component of a binding international obligation without explicit attribution to that obligation. Yunnan’s border-village programme illustrates the distributive capacity of developmental governance and its contribution to socioeconomic well-being, while documentary status, administrative inclusion and non-discrimination expose limits that aggregate indicators cannot capture. A dual-track model therefore distinguishes scalable public provision from the individualised legal visibility supplied by entitlement-based institutions. Comparison of the China–Vietnam, China–Myanmar and China–Laos borders further shows that cross-border social interests depend on counterpart administrative capacity and bilateral institutional operability. The analysis links treaty performance, borderland governance and regional institutional variation without treating explicit treaty discourse as its necessary starting point.