With the continuous advancement and deepening of the green transformation strategy, the divergence in ESG performance among enterprises has become increasingly prominent, and corporate social relationship structures serve as a crucial influencing factor for this issue. Based on the data of Chinese listed companies from 2013 to 2023, this paper constructs a social relationship network featuring longterm interaction stickiness and implicit trust among enterprises with intercorporate equity ties as the carrier, and empirically tests the impact of corporate network position on ESG performance. The research finds that social relationship network positions affect corporate ESG performance through two mechanisms: the improvement of corporate ESG practice capacity formed by social capital injection, and the enhancement of corporate ESG practice motivation derived from social risk prevention. Moreover, the intensity of such impacts varies according to differences in corporate internal resources endowments and power concentration. The research findings demonstrate the critical value of corporate social networks in promoting corporate sustainable development, providing theoretical references for relevant policy practices.