Driving Supply Chain Performance in China's Imported Soybean Supply Chain Through Strategies: The Mediating Role of Supply Chain

As the world's largest soybean importer, China's imported soybean supply chain faces recurrent disruptions, highlighting the urgency to clarify how supply chain strategies translate into operational performance under uncertainty.Grounded in dynamic capability theory, this study examines the mediating role of supply chain resilience (SCR) in linking four core strategic capabilities-flexibility, collaboration, agility, and innovation-to supply chain performance (SCP), using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) with data from 332 firms spanning procurement, logistics, and processing.Results show SCR partially mediates all four strategy-performance relationships, with significant heterogeneous indirect effects: collaboration exhibits the strongest indirect effect on SCP via SCR (=0.058,p<0.01, 95% CI [0.021, 0.103]), followed by flexibility (=0.046,p<0.01), agility (=0.040,p<0.05), and innovation (=0.030,p<0.05).This study is the first to quantify heterogeneous mediating effects of SCR in agricultural import supply chains, extending dynamic capability theory to context-specific agricultural systems.Practically, it provides actionable insights for prioritizing strategies, with firms advised to prioritize collaboration and flexibility to strengthen resilience in import-dependent soybean supply chains.