Has Digital Technology Empowerment Enhanced the Resilience of the Industrial Chain and Supply Chain?

The new wave of technological revolution and industrial transformation has created unprecedented opportunities for enhancing the resilience of manufacturing, industrial, and supply chains. Using panel data from 31 Chinese provinces covering the period 2004–2022, this study develops a comprehensive indicator system to measure dual-chain resilience and examines the impact of digital technology empowerment on its development. The results show that digital technology empowerment significantly enhances dual-chain resilience (coefficient = 0.286, p < 0.01), and the findings remain robust across a series of endogeneity and robustness tests. Mediation analysis shows that digital technology empowerment enhances dual-chain resilience through two complementary mechanisms: factor reallocation and scale expansion. Heterogeneity analysis further reveals that the benefits of digital technology empowerment differ across industrial characteristics and supply-chain positions, with downstream spillover effects (coefficient = 0.321, p < 0.01) substantially exceeding upstream effects (coefficient = 0.083, p < 0.05). Enterprise heterogeneity analysis reveals that the resilience gains from digital technology empowerment are primarily concentrated among capable firms, regardless of their readiness to adopt digital technologies, suggesting that capability, rather than readiness alone, is the critical determinant of successful digital empowerment outcomes. Moreover, exogenous shocks exert heterogeneous influences on the digital empowerment–resilience relationship, highlighting the buffering role of dual-chain resilience in mitigating external disruptions. These findings enrich the theoretical understanding of how digital technology empowerment strengthens dual-chain resilience and provide policy implications for promoting digital transformation, improving industrial circulation systems, and implementing differentiated digital empowerment strategies.