Abstract: The upgrading of the manufacturing industry structure is crucial for stimulating economic endogenous dynamism, shaping a nation's long-term competitive advantage, and promoting high-quality economic development. The organic integration of technology and finance serves as the core engine for deepening the supply-side structural reform of finance and promoting the structural upgrading of the manufacturing industry. By leveraging the quasi-natural experiment of the“Pilot Program for Promoting the Integration of Technology and Finance”and employing the triple difference method, an empirical analysis is conducted to examine the impact of technology finance on the output value share of internally segmented industries with varying technological complexities. The findings show that the development of technology finance can significantly drive the structural upgrading of the manufacturing industry. The mechanism testing shows that the development of technology finance promotes the upgrading of manufacturing structure by expanding the relative scale of financial structure, enhancing the relative vitality of financial structure, and improving the relative efficiency of financial structure. The heterogeneity analysis shows that in cities with higher levels of marketization or in non resource-based cities, the role of technology finance in upgrading the manufacturing industry structure is more significant. Therefore, the government should deepen the development of technology finance, optimize the financial structure, work together from both the supply side and demand side, and build a strong financial support system for the upgrading of the manufacturing industry structure, from the multidimensional perspectives such as scale, vitality, and efficiency. At the same time, the principles of differentiation and gradual development should be followed, and a cross regional collaborative mechanism should be established to form a new industrial pattern of coordinated development.

Key words: technology finance, financial structure, upgrading of manufacturing industry, technical complexity