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In the past 50 years, an increasing number of drought events have greatly affected the production and life of the people in Northeast China (NEC). The climatic conditions and sensitivities vary greatly in NEC due to complex terrain, large geographical range across latitudes and longitudes and different weather system effects. So, NEC is used to explore traditional geographical boundaries for meteorological drought research. In the paper, climate regionalization is performed by spatial hierarchical cluster approach based on the gridded dataset of monthly precipitation and temperature with a spatial resolution of 0.5°×0.5° in China from 1961 to 2016. Then, standardized precipitation index is employed to explore the temporal evolution of drought events, and wavelet method is used to detect drought periodicity in each sub-climatic region of NEC. The results show that: (1) Spatially, NEC can be divided into eight sub- climatic regions, namely, semi- arid agro- pastoral areas in the West Liaohe Plain, humid agro-forestry areas in the eastern mountainous areas of Jilin and Liaoning provinces, semi-arid pastoral areas in Hulun Buir Plateau, semi-humid and semi-arid agro-pastoral areas in central Northeast China, humid agro- forestry areas in the eastern mountainous areas of Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces, humid forestry areas in the north of Da Hinggan, humid and semi-humid agro-forestry areas in Hulun Buir Plateau and Heihe, and humid agricultural areas in Sanjiang Plain. (2) There are obvious differences for the temporal evolution of drought events in different sub-climatic regions, but three obvious drought periods, namely, late 1960s, late 1970s to early 1980s, and late 1990s to 2000s, can be found in each sub-region. The frequency and impact of droughts in NEC were the largest between 2000 and 2010, especially in the central and western parts of the study region. (3) There are significant drought periods of 11 years and 3- 8 years in the eight sub- climatic regions of NEC, and the first main cycles of drought variation are not completely consistent. It is a very important step to divide a region into homogeneous sub-regions based on one or more climatic variables in climate studies. Therefore, the results of this paper have practical significance for identifying the drivers of climate variability specific to each sub- climatic region, establishing drought monitoring programs for climate homogeneous regions and managing water resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]