Abstract: The concept of revealed comparative advantage (RCA), proposed by Balassa (1965), has proven useful in many research and policy applications. In standard applications, it is defined as the share of a sector in a country's total gross exports relative to the world average of the same sector in world exports. However, with the increasing international fragmentation of production and the evolution of global value chain revolution, the problem of double counting of certain value-added components in the official trade statistics suggests the traditional computation of RCA could be misleading since it ignores both domestic and international production sharing.
In order to remove this distortion, some authors have proposed using domestic value added in exports to substitute for gross exports as domestic value added in a country's exports describes the characteristics of a country's production.In this paper, this new substitution is followed,and multi-regional input-output model which is rooted in Johnson and Noguera (2012) is applied to analyze Chinese competitiveness of export and give the contrast analysis with other countries using the World Input-Output Database. The results show that China's comparative advantage sectors are still concentrated in primary products sectors and labor-intensive sectors such as agriculture and textiles during the period of 1995-2011. Although the competitiveness of some technology-intensive sectors is increasing over the years, the traditional RCA overestimates the growth rate.
Furthermore,it is pointed out that previous literatures ignore the prevalence of processing trade in China when computing the new RCA of Chinese sectors. In this study, the new RCA of Chinese industries is re-estimated using OECD world input-output tables which distinguish China's processing trade, by taking into account the trade heterogeneity in production technology. The results reveal that processing trade is quite a significant contributor to the RCA of China's technology-intensive manufactures while traditional labor-intensive manufacturing goods depended more on normal trade rather than processing trade.

Key words: revealed comparative advantage, global value Chain, value added exports, trade heterogeneity