Like India, China is very much a part of monsoon Asia.
It shares with
India its overall tendency to dry winters and wet summers, the summer
rain being brought by winds blowing off the ocean from the southeast.
The geographical distribution of the rainfall, however, is somewhat
different. China resembles India in having an arid northwest, but the
Chinese northeast is also relatively dry, so that the overall contrast
is between a dry north and a wet south (though the north was less dry
in the early Holocene than it is now). The most dramatic difference
between India and China, however, concerns the severity of winter.
Whereas Tibet protects India from the biting winds of Siberia, China is
wide open to them. Winter in the interior is thus brutal in the north
and cold even in central China.