Stitching Coherence: Performative Governance in a Chinese Border City

This article examines how state agents and allied actors produce spectacles and narratives of order and progress in the governance of a Chinese border city. Drawing on patchwork ethnography conducted between 2020 and 2025, it traces how bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, and local residents navigate shifting terrains of development, intensified pandemic control, and post-pandemic recovery by holding together contradictory practices – formal regulation and informal economy, containment and accumulation, crisis and recovery – without resolving their tensions. I propose stitching as an analytic for understanding border governance not as state withdrawal, but as performative intensification, through which legitimacy is generated by coordinating dissonant practices into provisional appearances of coherence. Such coherence depends on uneven distribution of labour, visibility, and accountability, and is sustained through everyday forms of complicity. Reflexively, the article also considers the stitching of ethnography itself, suggesting that acknowledging fragmentation can open new methodological and epistemic possibilities for anthropological knowledge production.