ENTERPRISE RESILIENCE AND CREDIT RATINGS OF CHINESE LISTED FIRMS: A CRITICAL REVIEW AND RESEARCH FRAMEWORK

Enterprise resilience is increasingly invoked to explain how firms anticipate disruption, preserve essential operations, and adapt after shocks, yet its relationship with credit ratings remains conceptually and empirically unsettled. This critical review synthesizes organizational resilience, corporate credit risk, operational risk, governance, and Chinese bond-market research to assess whether resilience offers information beyond conventional leverage, profitability, and liquidity measures. The literature suggests three plausible credit channels: reduced probability of cash-flow interruption, stronger capacity to absorb and recover from losses, and more credible governance and disclosure. Each channel has important qualifications. Financial buffers can reflect either prudent preparation or weak investment opportunities; market-return tails are imperfect proxies for operational continuity; and Chinese ratings embed agency-specific scales and expectations of government support. A multidimensional framework is proposed that separates ex ante capacity, observed shock response, and subsequent adaptation, with explicit attention to ownership, rating-agency choice, and timing. The review concludes that resilience should be tested as an incremental predictor of downgrades, spreads, and defaults, rather than assumed to cause higher rating grades. Its principal contribution is a testable research design for Chinese A-share issuers that links management capabilities to measurable credit outcomes without treating planned empirical analysis as completed evidence.