Abstract: The crude oil importing countries are nowadays taking advantage of the diversification strategy to shield from the risk of oil import in the strained circumstance of world wide crude oil import.The oil strategy of a country is however highly tied up with other countries with the rapidly intensified affinity in crude oil trade.Therefore,an in-depth understanding and extensive knowledge in the status of external oil trade is justified in the decision-making and executing process of oil strategy.Ignorance of such interactive effects will definitely incur obstruction to the diversification strategy and further detriment to the guarantee of oil importing safety.This paper develops a novel approach to assessing the world’s network of crude oil import and revealing the evolving law of the degree,weight,and standard entropy with the aid of complex network method.Furthermore, a parallel regional comparison is analyzed to highlight the differences between the states and the homogeneity of international crude oil trade networks.A simulation analysis of the spatial structure of world crude oil trade is finally presented.Major conclusions are drawn as follows: 1) Variations in terms of the importing and exporting nodes within the period from 2001 to 2008 are marginal and therefore indicate relatively stable orientations of trading countries;2) An ascending trend in terms of global crude petroleum trade magnitude,together with the more aggressive competition in the crude petroleum trade,is revealed from the perspective of exporting and importing weights.The general pattern indicates that most of the crude petroleum is transported from Middle-east,Africa,Central and South Americ,East Europe as well as Middle Asia to Asia-Pacific,North America,Central Europe and West Europe;3) Heterogeneity to a certain extent is also demonstrated with the spatial structure of global petroleum trade.However,neither the structure entropy nor the weight entropy indicates a random spatial structure of global crude petroleum but an ordered one.Comparison of weight and structure entropy shows that quota is more homogeneous than weight,which can therefore scale the desire of the countries to build more comprehensive relations,despite the fact that resource reserve determines the magnitude of petroleum trade.4) Diversity in terms of magnitude and direction of connection in the network nodes is highlighted by the topology structure of global crude petroleum trade.The Middle East is still the primary supplier who provides most of the petroleum to the majority of the world,while other areas including the former Soviet Union,West Africa,North Africa and North America(Canada and Mexico)mainly provide crude petroleum to specific regions.Non-uniform spatial structure is also displayed by the topology structure of global crude petroleum.In conclusion,diversification does not necessarily mean homogeneity.The resource reserve in each region varies and the economic and political relationships in different regions are also diverse,which consequently justify that diversification of import channels depends on the objective situation and relationship with business partners.