Research on Cross-border Commercial Social Governance of Ethnic Minorities on Sino-Vietnamese Border from Anthropological Perspective

The Sino-Vietnamese borderlands represent a unique cross-border ethnic enclave characterized by frequent grassroots commercial exchanges, culturally embedded ethnic livelihood traditions, and overlapping governance logics of state formal regulation and indigenous customary norms. Cross-border commercial activities conducted by ethnic minority groups are not merely economic transactional behaviors but comprehensive socio-cultural practices deeply embedded in cross-border communal relations, constructing a distinctive grassroots governance scenario fundamentally different from inland market-oriented commercial governance. Adopting core theoretical lenses from cultural and economic anthropology—including embeddedness theory, communal social network theory, and grassroots practice theory—this study focuses on cross-border commercial governance practices of the Zhuang, Yao, and Miao ethnic communities in the Yunnan-Guangxi Sino-Vietnamese border regions. Based on 10-year longitudinal community panel data (2015–2024), multi-site ethnographic fieldwork, and in-depth semi-structured interview datasets, this paper establishes an integrated theoretical framework of “institutional embeddedness-cultural adaptation-social order reconstruction”. It systematically unpacks the dual governance mechanism of formal state border supervision and informal ethnic customary institutions, and identifies core governance dilemmas including institutional friction, cross-cultural dissonance, and governance fragmentation. Combining qualitative grounded theory analysis and quantitative Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) verification, this study empirically examines the causal effects of ethnic cultural capital, cross-border social networks, and institutional coordination on cross-border commercial governance efficiency. The results indicate that indigenous governance resources (kinship trust, folk credit norms, and traditional trade ethics) serve as the implicit institutional foundation for grassroots cross-border commerce, effectively compensating for the rigidity and adaptability defects of formal state supervision. Nevertheless, cross-border factor mobility, Sino-Vietnamese cultural heterogeneity, and asymmetric border regulatory systems trigger persistent conflicts between formal and informal governance regimes, hindering the standardized and sustainable development of cross-border commercial economies. Heterogeneity analysis further confirms that community-based ethnic elite governance exhibits higher efficiency in small-scale informal folk trade, while formal institutional governance dominates the regulation of large-scale standardized cross-border transactions. This study theoretically innovates by integrating anthropological embeddedness perspectives into border commercial governance research, breaking the single institutional-centric paradigm of existing border governance literature and enriching the interdisciplinary theoretical system of ethnic cross-border social governance. Practically, it proposes targeted optimization strategies of cultural empowerment, institutional synergy, and multi-stakeholder co-governance, providing empirical evidence and policy implications for inclusive, standardized, and stable governance of Sino-Vietnamese ethnic border economies and border social security maintenance.