Governing by withholding: Negative capacity and ethical silence in China’s frontline governance

This article examines how governance actors exercise discretion when surveillance makes visible deviation risky. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, more than 600 hours of participant observation, and 60 interviews in Southwestern China, it follows moments when actors interrupt the conversion of problems into records, sanctions, complaints, or reports. Four withholding practices emerge: trace deflection, sanction suspension, audit buffering, and administrative nonactivation. Negative capacity names the wider governance mechanism through which actors pause, soften, or incompletely enact institutional scripts, while ethical silence describes provisionally defensible uses of that capacity. Such uses attend to vulnerability, exercise proportional judgment, assume institutional exposure, and limit avoidable harm. Its ethical force depends on who receives protection and whether withholding reproduces privilege or displaces harm. The article contributes to the sociology of silence, street-level bureaucracy, and surveillance by showing how intensified visibility relocates moral agency to the threshold between recognition and consequence.