International industrial transfer is an important way for emerging countries to participate in globalized mass production and to be embedded in the global value chain division. Since the fourth international industrial transfer, intra-industry transfers have replaced inter-industry transfers, with transnational corporations taking the lead in globalized mass production on the basis of factor endowments. Many countries only take on a part of the production chain; developed countries firmly control the high-end segment of the value chain by virtue of their advanced technologies, and developing countries generally occupy the middle- and low-end production segments. China and the ASEAN countries are typical of the outward-looking economic development model, and under this "low-end embedded" global value chain model, China and ASEAN countries are mainly engaged in low-end processing, assembly and other labor-intensive production processes in the manufacturing industry, and they are still locked in the middle and lower ends of the global value chain by developed countries. At present, how to promote China and ASEAN countries to make leaps forward in the manufacturing global value chain has become an important issue to be resolved.
In order to determine the general rule of the impact of international industrial transfer on the status of global value chains, the article measures the scale of international industrial transfer between China and ASEAN countries from 1995 to 2018 based on the OECD-TiVA (2021) database, using the input-output model and the GVC decomposition method, and further divides the international industrial transfer into two categories, namely, international industrial transfer of intermediate products and international industrial transfer of intermediate products. The theory analyzes the mechanism of the impact of industrial transfer on the status of global value chain, and the positive impact mainly stems from the three aspects of technology spillover, financing constraints and product quality improvement. Negative impacts mainly stem from FDI technology lock-in, "crowding-out effect" and "low-end lock-in" effect. Technological innovation is the endogenous driving force for the upgrading of GVCs in China and ASEAN countries. Firstly, technological innovation can improve the labor productivity of the manufacturing industry, enhance the international competitiveness of products, and achieve product upgrading; secondly, technology can also promote the improvement of the original production process and the research and development of new products, so as to achieve the upgrading of the manufacturing industry's functions; lastly, technological innovation can promote the enterprises to leap from the low-end to the high-end, and ultimately achieve the upgrading of the GVCs.
The research results show that international industrial transfer has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the GVC status of manufacturing industries in China and ASEAN countries, which implies that, in the long run, there is a ceiling effect on the upgrading of manufacturing GVCs in China and ASEAN countries. At present, most of the manufacturing industries have not yet crossed the inflection point, and are in the "moderate range" of international industrial transfer to promote the upgrading of manufacturing GVC status, which is conducive to promoting the upgrading of manufacturing GVC status in China and ASEAN countries, and the inverted U-shape relationship is still robust after a variety of robustness tests. The moderating effect of technological innovation is significant, weakening the inverted U-shaped relationship between the two, and contributing to flatten the inverted U-shaped curve of the impact of international industrial transfer on the GVC status of the manufacturing industry than that in the benchmark regression results. In the short term, technological innovation will increase the innovation investment of enterprises in China and ASEAN countries, which increases the cost and risk of enterprise application; in the long term, as the embedded position in the GVC of China and ASEAN countries continues to improve, technological innovation can reduce the technological dependence on developed countries, achieve technological independence and autonomy and enhance the international competitiveness of enterprises. Extended analysis reveals that forward GVC participation weakens the inverted U-shaped relationship between international industrial transfer and manufacturing GVC position, while backward GVC participation strengthens this "low-end lock-in" effect; the inverted U-shaped curve between international industrial transfer of final products and manufacturing GVC position is steeper than that of international industrial transfer of intermediate products.