<p>This study examines the academic resilience of rural graduate students in China who progressed from ordinary undergraduate universities to C9 League universities. It explores how their educational trajectories are shaped by the interplay between structural constraints and individual agency. Unlike Western accounts that highlight personal struggle and community empowerment, these students’ resilience emerges through the entanglement of policy frameworks, familial expectations, and personal aspirations. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 15 participants, the study applies a temporally embedded model of agency to trace resilience as an evolving process rather than a fixed trait. Findings show that, in rural upbringing, family sacrifice, and experiences in ordinary universities are reinterpreted as practices sustaining resilience under pressure. In the projective dimension, an idealized self-anchored in elite universities’ imaginaries converts moral obligations to family into development-oriented aspirations. In the practical-evaluative dimension, rural students continuously recalibrate strategies to navigate capital deficits, unfavourable peer comparison, and constrained networks. Together, these dynamics illuminate the layered temporality of resilience across short-distance and long-distance academic mobility. Conceptually, the paper extends resilience research by integrating temporal agency with China’s policy-engineered hierarchy, revealing how implicit inequalities shape aspiration, affect, and strategy over time. Practically, it suggests shifting institutional efforts from celebrating individual grit toward reducing the structural need for resilience through more inclusive educational policies and equitable resource distribution.</p>