Borderlands in transition: informal governance in Yunnan’s cockfighting

In Yunnan’s frontier borderlands, cockfighting occupies a dual status as a culturally embedded tradition and a sporadically commercialised practice that may intersect with informal gambling and small-scale cross-border transactions. Grounded in kinship trust, local reputation and culturally rooted legitimacy, it functions not only as a form of social cohesion, but also as an informal regulatory mechanism through which communities negotiate order, mediate disputes and manage their interaction with state authority. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in multiple border villages, this study reveals that governance unfolds within cultural grey zones where legality, informality and cultural norms are continuously interpreted and selectively enforced. Rather than adopting uniform prohibition, local authorities differentiate between culturally embedded practices that require guidance or minor compliance, and profit-oriented, organised activities that warrant intervention. Conceptualised as cultural grey governance, the analysis demonstrates how territorial authority in transitional borderlands is reconfigured not solely through legal control, but through negotiation, relational mediation and adaptive alignment between state regulation and local legitimacy. These findings deepen existing debates on border governance, informal authority and the socio-political production of legitimacy in frontier regions.