How do China's oil markets affect other commodity markets both domestically and internationally?

•The contemporaneous causality among Chinese and international commodity markets is studied.•An error correction model combined with a directed acyclic graph method is employed.•China's oil markets are cointegrated with other commodity markets.•China's crude oil market is always a price taker affected by other markets.•The whole influence of China's commodity markets is strengthened.

This study investigates the contemporaneous causality between China's oil markets with other commodity markets both domestically and internationally using an error correction model combined with a directed acyclic graph technique. The results indicate that China's oil markets are cointegrated with other commodity markets both domestically and internationally. The impact of China's fuel oil futures market on other domestic commodity markets is great when oil prices are high, but the influence is comparatively weak when oil prices are lower. However, due to the lack of futures market, China's crude oil market has little influence on other commodity markets at any time.