Abstract: Structural adjustment of manufacturing industry is an important measure in China’s structural reform of supply side. However, during the process of structure adjustment in the manufacturing industry, whether to follow or deviate from the path of comparative advantage evolution has an important impact on the upgrading of manufacturing industry. By making use of the data from the Commodity Trade Statistics Database of United Nations, this paper constructs a spatial distribution map of the world products, based on that it draws a dynamic evolution path of China’s comparative advantages, so as to make an empirical analysis of the relationship between the structure adjustment of China’s manufacturing industry and the comparative advantages. The results show that the dynamic change tendency of the comparative advantages is coincide with the competitive advantages of the existing industry, but the relevancy concerning the promotion of the upgrade of the existing emerging industries is poor. The relevancy in the labor-intensive industry is higher, while in the capital and technology-intensive industries the deviation is significant. From the comparison between the countries, the structural adjustment of China’s manufacturing industry and the deviating degree of the dynamic changes of comparative advantages are more obvious than that in the economic entities of different types.

Key words: structural adjustment of manufacturing industry; comparative advantage; product spatial structure