Value Chain and Technology-Based Complexity Analysis of China’s Manufacturing Exports

In recent years, China’s manufacturing industry has developed rapidly, but numerous studies have shown that China is not a manufacturing powerhouse. In recent years, the division of labor in global value chains has been booming, and the Chinese manufacturing industry has been actively integrated into it with its labor cost advantage and achieved rapid development. There is an urgent need to transform and upgrade to high value-added links in the value chain. This paper measures the upstream degree of China’s manufacturing industry through the world input-output table and uses it as an indicator to measure the global value chain status, focusing on the heterogeneous impact of different types of productive services on the upgrading of China’s manufacturing industry’s global value chain status. This study examines the impact of global value chain boundary lessness and institutional quality on the technological complexity of China’s equipment manufacturing exports, using panel data of six types of Chinese equipment manufacturing industries from 2007 to 2018 as a sample. The findings show that intermediate manufactured goods from intermediate imports and intermediate products from developing economies make the strongest contribution to imported intermediate manufactured goods from developing economies. By industry, the impact areas of Graph Visualization (GV) embedding and institutional quality are different. GV embedding has a stronger contribution to the manufacturing of communication, computer, and other electronic equipment, while institutional quality has a stronger contribution to the manufacturing of special office machinery, and the interaction between the two is the same as that of institutional quality.