Abstract: In the context of economic globalization, a country’s steel industry chain is not a closed system.Each phase carries out material exchange between internal systems and external systems through the international trade.This paper constructed global iron element material flow complex network models of phases in the industrial chain, and analyzed the overall network characteristics, as well as the country’s total import and export volume and controllability over resource flows in the network.The main conclusions are as follows:the amount of global trade of iron ore being the largest, the network density being the smallest, the countries being the least closely related, and the degree of globalization being the lowest, the trade volume is mainly concentrated in a few countries and a few trade relations; global trade network of steel products being the largest, with the largest number of countries and trade relations, the highest trade tightness between countries, and the highest level of globalization, the global trade network of scrap is the most clearly divided and shows a strong trade grouping; China has a high level of control over the trade networks of iron ore, pig iron, crude steel, and scrap, but its controll ability over steel and steel products networks not high.