Traditional international trade theories have some limits in analyzing international crude oil trade as a system with numerous countries and complicated relationships. Complex network theory provides a method to analyze the world-wide trade system entirely and partly. Complex network models on direct relationships are fundamental analysis; we went further and established a new model based on indirect relationships. This paper established a trading-based network model of international crude oil to study the relationship between countries with common trade partners. There are two types of networks in our model: importing-based network and exporting-based network. We studied their evolution of scales, stability, hierarchy structure and partition over time. We found that the international crude oil trade is evolving into a stable, ordered and integrated system, and different types of events show different impacts on the importing and exporting countries, thus we provided different policy implications. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.