**1. Introduction**

Green sustainable development is a very important supply chain strategy, which has received widespread attention worldwide [1,2]. Increasing public awareness, increasingly stringent government regulatory requirements, and market pressures have forced many companies to incorporate green and sustainable development into their supply chain [3]. In China, with its rapid economic development, resource and environmental problems are becoming more and more serious such as severe smog, lack of water, soil pollution, etc. Additionally, these resource waste and pollutant emissions mainly come from manufacturing industries. Therefore, the Chinese government and the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) have promulgated and implemented stricter government regulatory policies, forcing many manufacturers to focus on sustainable supply chain. In fact, many manufacturers have started green sustainable supply chain management, which is more important than some supply chain management issues (such as integration and cooperation), raising environmental awareness such as green procurement, green transportation, green packaging, etc., and strives to promote suppliers implement environmental management.

Effective management of a green supply chain (GSC) requires an expanded perspective beyond a focus company including supply chain partners [4]. Value co-creation is considered as a business cooperation strategy for supply chain partners. As the cost of green innovation is relatively high, some manufacturers have started to cooperate with other enterprises in the supply chain (such as suppliers and retailers) to jointly develop green products and technologies [1,5]. For example, companies such as BMW, Patagonia, and the Body Shop have taken a sustainable approach by developing innovative environmentally friendly products with their consumers and have realized that the development of green products/services has become a new competitive advantage for their firms [1].

The current literature relevant to co-creation indicates that it is conducive to the deep cooperation between supply chain enterprises [4]. For the value co-creation of GSC, it is beneficial for upstream and downstream firms to share green technology investment and improve the efficiency of the whole supply chain [6]. However, there are contradicting views on the impact of co-creation on supply chain performance. For example, some literature suggests that value co-creation could cause organizational conflicts such as relationship conflict (i.e., the incompatibility in buyer-supplier manufacturer relationship) and task conflict (i.e., the differences in positions and ideas of tasks performed by suppliers and manufacturers), thereby causing a negative impact on performance [7–9]. Thus, the connotation of value co-creation and its impact on performance in the context of green supply chain are still unclear and need to be explored.

As a complex system, manufacturing is directly or indirectly related to the creation of economic wealth and impacts on the product life cycle of the natural environment and social systems [6]. Due to different sectors, the internal and external contextual factors of the manufacturer have an important impact on the implementation of the manufacturing supply chain strategy. The internal environment support mainly refers to some internal firm factors that influence the activities of the enterprise (e.g., the staff, culture, and operations process [8,10]). For example, some of the literature indicates that the attitude and ability of managers is highly relevant with the implementation of a green supply chain and value co-creation [8,10]. The external environmental pressures refer to the macro-factors such as marketing pressure and institutional pressures. Indeed, some literature suggests that internal contextual factors could have some influence on the implementation of supply chain strategies [10]. Thus, we need to further explore the actual impact of these contextual factors on the implementation of a green supply chain.

This paper mainly focused on two problems: (1) How does the firm's green supply chain strategy impact the performance by value co-creation behaviors? and (2) How does the internal environment support and external contextual factors impact on the relationship between green strategy adoption and value co-creation? First, this paper proposes a theoretical model of value co-creation under the green supply chain strategy and further posited the hypotheses in Figure 1. We examined 115 manufacturers through a series of statistical methods. Our findings indicate that adoption of the green supply chain strategy by firms can indeed improve operational performance, financial performance, and even innovation performance by a value co-creation strategy. In addition, external and internal contextual factors have a different moderating effect on the relationship between GSC strategy, value co-creation, and performance. Our findings enrich the literature relevant to co-creation by exploring new insights into green supply chain strategies and considering the roles of some contextual factors. In addition, our findings enhance the internal power of manufacturers and their upstream and downstream firms to implement a green supply chain management and provide some suggestions for practitioners.

The main contributions of this paper are as follows: This paper innovatively studies the green supply chain management from the perspective of value co-creation. Regarding the selection of value co-creation behavior factors, this paper considers three different value co-creation behaviors between manufacturers, suppliers, competitors, and retailers. This paper evaluates corporate performance from three aspects: operational performance, innovative performance, and financial performance. At the same time, this paper analyzed the coordination effect of the internal environment and external environment on the value co-creation of a green supply chain. In the internal environment, this paper particularly studied the influence of the digital level of enterprises on green value co-creation, which is innovative to some extent.

**Figure 1.** Conceptual model.

The rest of this paper is arranged as follows. Section 2 introduces the literature review of related topics. Section 3 explains the conceptual model of the hypothesis. Section 4 introduces the research methods, and Section 5 introduces the results of the empirical analysis. Section 6 discusses the main findings and Section 7 introduces the conclusions, limitations, and future research directions.
