Ways to accurately identify and measure systemic risk of oil imports continues to be the focus of intense research because of the increasing importance of energy security. This study reexamines the risk of oil imports from the perspective of global oil supply chain (OSC) and designs a standardized framework of four risk factors, that is, availability, accessibility, affordability and acceptability risk. The former three factors reveal the internal physical disruption risk of OSC and the last describes the external economic risk which OSC faces. Then, a two-dimensional matrix is proposed to derive systemic risk of oil imports from the internal to external risk. Taken China's OSC for example, the empirical results demonstrate that the method proposed in this study has the advantages of wide applicability and good efficiency. The results show that, during the period 2003-2013, China's oil-imports risk has experienced three different evolution stages, which are driven by different risk-dominate factors. On considering that China's OSC has different risk characters in different stages, there is absolutely a need for China to make some improvements in the strategy and tactics of oil imports. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.