Spatiotemporal Evolution, Convergence, and Driving Factors of Green Industry Chain Resilience in China

Considering rising global uncertainties and intensifying resource and environmental pressures, it has become an inevitable trend to add more ecologically green factors to the traditional industrial chain resilience system and build a system of green industrial chain resilience (GICR). To address the inherent tension between security and green goals, this study develops a novel two-dimensional analytical framework encompassing fracture repair capacity and development regeneration capacity. This framework provides the theoretical foundation for constructing a pioneering city-level evaluation system for GICR. Employing this system and a suite of spatial econometric methods, we empirically analyze the spatiotemporal evolution, convergence, and driving mechanisms of GICR across 245 Chinese cities. The main findings are threefold. First, the proposed framework effectively captures the complexity of GICR, revealing an overall upward trend but significantly widening regional disparities, with a persistent core-periphery spatial pattern. Second, convergence analysis uncovers a club convergence dynamic nationwide, characterized by a notable “high-level equilibrium lock-in” in the advanced eastern region, in contrast to the catch-up convergence observed in central, western, and northeastern China. Third, geographical detector analysis identifies talent agglomeration as the paramount driver, with its interaction with other factors producing nonlinear enhancement effects. These findings underscore that enhancing GICR requires regionally differentiated strategies: policies must break the innovation lock-in in the east, embed resilience standards into industrial transfer in the central and western regions, and prioritize talent as the core lever for synergistic capacity building.