For a country that imports crude oil, the forex burden is always fluctuant due to the fluctuation of international crude oil prices and exchange rates over time. The gap discovered between international crude oil prices and the crude oil price based on exchange rates may indicate the fluctuation of the forex burden. There exist different fluctuant patterns in the fluctuation process of the forex burden in different periods. Hence, we proposed an approach combining econometrics and complex network theory to explore the transmission mechanism of these fluctuant patterns. In this study, we defined the forex burden and the fluctuant patterns by normalization, sliding windows of data and econometric models. And then we set the fluctuant patterns as nodes and the transformation between patterns as edges; in this way, the transmission complex network is constructed. The results show that different major fluctuant patterns with different probabilities appear in different scales. The fluctuant patterns transferred into each other conveniently. And the transmission medium can help to identify the transitional periods in the process of the transmission. The contribution of this study to the energy policy decision-making is that the formulations of related policies under different period lengths require different reference standards. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.