As the pillar industry in China's post-industrial era, the equipment manufacturing industry has played an important role of providing technical equipment for downstream industries, which also brought about a substantial increase in CO2 emissions. Therefore, in order to find ways to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of the equipment manufacturing industry, this paper based on the global value chain production length decomposition model, improved the CO2 emission effect model and the STIRPAT model to study the different impact of the GVC production length on the CO2 emissions of China's equipment manufacturing industry under different GVC participation modes. The study found that extending GVC production length can effectively reduce CO2 emissions, and the CO2 reduction effect of the simple GVC production length is the most significant. Besides, with the extension of the GVC production length, the CO2 emissions of high-tech industries have decreased, while the CO2 emissions of medium-technology industries have increased. In addition, the improvements of policy regulations, factor structure and foreign investment will also reduce CO2 emissions, but the expansion of production scale and R&D investment will increase CO2 emissions.