Abstract: Outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan calls for further advancing the construction of Digital China and promoting green transformation of economic and social development. In light of this, leveraging digital transformation to improve the ESG performance of resource-based industries has become an important issue. Based on the data of Chinese A-share listed mining companies from 2011 to 2023, with a two-way fixed effects model, this paper empirically examines the impact, mechanisms, and heterogeneity of digital transformation on ESG performance. The findings are as follows. Firstly, digital transformation significantly improves the ESG performance of mining enterprises, suggesting that the adoption of digital technologies is an effective pathway for promoting sustainable development in the mining corporation. Secondly, digital transformation has a significant positive effect on social performance and governance performance, but its direct impact on environmental performance is not statistically significant. This indicates that the current digital transformation of mining enterprises is more strongly associated with improvements in social responsibility practices and governance structures, while its environmental benefits have not yet fully materialized. Thirdly, mechanism tests show that digital transformation improves ESG performance of mining enterprises primarily through three channels: strengthening internal control, promoting green innovation, and enhancing information transparency. Lastly, heterogeneity analysis reveals that the improvement effect is stronger for non-state-owned mining enterprises than for state-owned ones, and is significant in the eastern and central regions, while it is not yet evident in western regions and no robust effect is observed in the northeastern regions. The findings provide empirical evidence for mining enterprises to formulate differentiated strategies that integrate digitalization and ESG, and offer policy implications for policymakers to advance the green transformation of the mining sector by category, optimize the allocation of digital infrastructure, and improve ESG governance mechanisms.