Social capital grounded in forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation and household livelihood resilience in rural border areas: evidence from southern Xinjiang, China

How community building relates to household livelihood resilience is an important question for multiethnic border regions. We examine this question by measuring social capital grounded in forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation (FSC-CN) using 2025 survey data from 591 households in four prefectures of southern Xinjiang. We compare this contextualized measure with a conventional social-capital benchmark and examine its dimensions, resource pathways, and livelihood differences. We find a significant positive association with resilience that persists after household-resource adjustment and the exclusion of potentially overlapping content from both indices. The contextualized measure also provides additional explanatory information beyond the conventional benchmark. Dimension-level analysis identifies significant independent associations for relational and structural capital, while sequential-path estimates connect cognitive orientations with resilience through relational capital. This combination highlights how shared orientations are connected to reciprocal relationships and organizational networks. We further find positive digital-capability and policy-benefit paths, with the clearest evidence for digital capability. The stronger association among households with more rural-oriented livelihoods underscores the relevance of social connections where production information and cooperation are recurrent needs. Our findings locate the practical significance of community-oriented social capital in usable relationships and access to information and organizational resources. They provide household-level evidence to inform digital assistance and organizational services in border regions. We interpret these findings as cross-sectional relationships and statistical pathways.