Abstract: With the development of economic globalization, the international vertical specialization division dominated by multinational corporations has become the main form of modern international division of labor and trade. Based on the world input-output table, this paper adopts the global value chains decomposition method to decompose China’s total export into 16 parts, and constructs two indicators to measure China’s degree and position of vertical specialization from the overall export and bilateral levels: VSS (backward vertical specialization rate) and VSS1 (forward vertical specialization rate). The results show that China is more involved in backward international vertical specialization, mainly participating in the production links with low added value such as product processing and assembly design, and locates in the lower end of the global value chains. However, from the perspective of the composition of VS and the difference between VSS and VSS1, China is climbing up the global value chain in recent years, starting to undertake more intermediate links in the international division of labor, and trade quality has been improved. At the same time, China’s backward vertical specialization source and forward vertical specialization destination are more dispersed, no longer just concentrated in the United States, Japan, and South Korea.