How Digital Transformation Shapes Export Resilience——Case Insights from China’s Manufacturing Sector under Global Trade Fragmentation

This study explores how Chinese manufacturing enterprises build export resilience through digital transformation. It examines the interaction between external factors such as global trade fragmentation, market uncertainty, and technological change and internal capability reconfiguration. The study addresses a gap by proposing and applying the Policy–Technology–Organisation (PTO) tri-helix framework in a state-led policy context. First, the paper reviews existing research on digital transformation and export resilience. It finds that most Western literature focuses on market-driven and technology-determinist views and pays less attention to mechanisms under state-led policies. Therefore, the study aims to contextualise the process of resilience formation in Chinese manufacturing firms. This study selects Haier, Sany, and Zoomlion as typical case companies.The research adopts a multi-case study approach with an interpretivist and constructivist paradigm, including mechanism comparison, cross-case pattern matching, and corporate reports analysis, industry white papers, and policy documents. Drawing on the framework of policy trigger–technological penetration–organisational restructuring–resilience output, the study classifies three types of export resilience: absorptive, recovery, and transformative. It also compares their performance in market diversification, crisis recovery cycles, as well as resilience outcomes. The result shows that export resilience is shaped by the interaction of external institutional cues and internal dynamic capability reconfiguration. Different forms and implications of resilience are produced by differences in organizational alignment, the degree of technology penetration, and the effectiveness of policy translation. The study theoretically expands the dynamic capabilities view by emphasizing the significance of institutional embeddedness and firms' positioning within global networks. From a practical perspective, this study shows recommendations on how to align digital strategies with export resilience goals. At the end it also identifies limitations in sample coverage, data granularity, and methodology, and recommends further research on cross-country comparisons, quantitative modeling, and the restructuring of global value chains.