As an important agricultural production zone of commercial and economic crop, Northeast China is susceptible to suffering from precipitation anomaly and drought risk. With global climate change and regional reduction of precipitation reducing, droughts happened much more frequently in Northeast China. At present, only a few studies paid attention to droughts in Northeast China, and inconsistent results was showed in these studies. Additionally, most of these studies tried to detect the spatiotemporal variation or to explore the effects of drought. However, few researchs have identified the regionalization of drought in Northeast China. Based on the monthly mean air temperature and precipitation data from 1961 to 2013, the temporal and spatial patterns of drought were analyzed by applying the S-mode PCA to the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) estimated on 12-month timescales. The result showed that during the period of 1961 to 2013,drought in Northeast China tended to be gradually severe. In 19611999,droughts happened at a lower frequency, shorter duration and lesser damage than that in 20002012. Two consecutive drought periods occurred in the years of 20002002 and 20072008. According to the spatial distribution of drought in Northeast China in the past half century, the driest period was from 2000 to 2010, which affected the largest drought area and exhibited highest drought frequency, especially in the central and south part, with a respectively drought frequency of 42.86% and 33.34%. Principal component analysis and cluster analysis were applied to regionalize the drought of Northeast China, and eight different drought sub-regions were identified. Our results could make contribution to monitoring and assessment of drought. and it could also be further used in the alleviation of the loss resulting from droughts and guidelines of water resource management and regional agricultural production.