Abstract: Based on the trade data of 86 major countries from 2001 to 2014, this paper uses the method of social network analysis (SNA) to construct a global trade network and then analyzes the network characteristics and status of individual countries from the perspectives of network centrality, strength and heterogeneity. On this basis, we empirically examines the impact of the status of a country's trade network on its export technology sophistication. The result indicates that the improvement of the status of a country's trade network has a significant role in the upgrading of its export technology sophistication. With the conditional distribution of a country's export technical sophistication from low-end to high-end, the upgrading effect of network status presents a trend of weakening. Furthermore, threshold regression analysis finds that an increase in the level of trade liberalization strengthens the upgrading effect of the network centrality and heterogeneity on its export technology sophistication, but weakens the positive effect of the strength. Therefore, China should actively transform its advantage of the status in the trade network into the advantage of export technology sophistication, materializing the transition of China from a large trading market to a large trading power, and realizing high-quality development of trade.

Key words: trade network, export technology sophistication, trade liberalization, social network analysis