6.1 Climate
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.