Nowadays the global economy is increasingly built within the framework of global value chains (GVCs). For many national economies participation in GVCs contributes to economic growth, increased productivity, and the introduction of innovation. China, which has emerged as a major player in the global economic arena over the past decades, occupies a special place in these processes. In the first part of the paper, the author aims to trace the trends and stages of China’s integration into the global economy within the context of GVCs, taking into account both the logic of China’s economic advancement (internal factors) and events on the global economic arena (external factors). The author proposes to distinguish four stages of China’s consistent integration into the world economy (“plugging in”, “upgrading”, “building up”, and “restructuring”) within the context of participation in global and regional value chains. The identification of these stages is carried out within the framework of the input-output methodology and the decomposition of gross exports. This allows to calculate indicators of China’s participation in GVCs, in particular, domestic value added, foreign value added, global value chain participation index, and forward and backward participation in GVCs.