LAUSR

Quantitative assessment and visual analysis of the multidimensional features of international bilateral product trade are crucial for global trade research. However, current methods face poor salience and expression issues when analysing the characteristics of China—Australia bilateral trade from 1998 to 2019. To address this, we propose a new perspective that involves period division, feature extraction, construction of product space, and spatiotemporal analysis by selecting the display competitive advantage index using the digital trade feature map (DTFM) method. Our results reveal that the distribution of product importance in China—Australia bilateral trade is heavy-tailed, and that the number of essential products has decreased by 68% over time. The proportion of products in which China dominates increased from 71% to 77%. Furthermore, Australia consistently maintains dominance in the most crucial development in trade, and the supremacy of the head product is becoming stronger. Based on these findings, the stability of bilateral trade between Australia and China is declining, and the pattern of polarisation in the importance of traded products is worsening. This paper proposes a novel method for studying Sino—Australian trade support. The analytical approach presented can be extended to analyse the features of bilateral trade between other countries.