Building Rural Resilience Through a Neo-Endogenous Approach in China: Unraveling the Metamorphosis of Jianta Village

Rural resilience building has gained increasing scholarly attention, yet existing literature overlooks the temporal dynamics of resilience evolution and lacks an integrative framework to explain cross-level mechanisms. This paper uses a longitudinal case study to explore how rural resilience transitions from a low-equilibrium to a high-equilibrium state and how neo-endogenous practices emerge in a weak institutional context. The study reveals three key findings. First, the village’s resilience evolved through three phases—institutional intervention, community capital activation, and resilience self-reinforcement—driven by co-evolutionary interactions between an enabling government and the rural community. This process is marked by chain effects of multidimensional community capital (e.g., cultural capital enhancing social capital) and overflow effects from resilience amplification (e.g., multi-scalar network). Second, exogenous resources and endogenous community capital are critical in the neo-endogenous model, but their synergy relies on vertical institutional interventions that foster horizontal networks and enhance communities’ resource absorption capacity. Third, the government enables resilience building by creating a support ecosystem that transitions from institutionally bundled resources to a higher-order composite space, facilitated by urban–rural interactions and community restructuring. The study makes three theoretical contributions: (1) it proposes an analytical framework integrating an enabling government, community capital, and ecosystem upgrading, thus advancing beyond the current community capital-centric paradigm; (2) it introduces a three-phase process model that unpacks spatiotemporal interactions across urban-rural interfaces, multi-scalar networks, and state-community relations, addressing the limitations of static factor-based analyses; (3) it reconceptualizes the role of government as an “enabling government” that mediates local and extra-local resource interfaces, challenging the neo-endogenous theories’ neglect of institutional agency. These insights contribute to rural resilience scholarship through a complex adaptive systems lens and offer policy implications for synergistic urban-rural revitalization.