Data sets of 26 fisheries target species from the fishery-depen-dent and fishery-independent surveys in the overwintering ground of open waters of northern East China Sea (OW-NECS), combined sea surface temperature (SST), were used to examine the links between diversity index, pattern of common variability and climate changes based on the principal component analysis (PCA) and generalized additive model (GAM). The results showed that the shift from a cold regime to a warm regime was detected in SST during the 1970s-2011 with step changes around 1982/ 1983. SST increased during the cold regime and the warm regime before 1998 (warming trend period, 1972-1998), and decreased during the warm regime after 1998 (cooling trend period, 1999-2011). Shannon diversity index was largely dependent on the filefish, which contributed up to 50% of the total production as a single species,with low diversity in the waters of the OW-NECS,during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Excluding the filefish, the diversity index linearly increased and decreased during 1972- 1998 and 1999 - 2011,respectively. The variation pattern generally corresponds with the trend in water temperature,strongly suggesting the effect of the SST on the diversity. The first two components (PC1 and PC2) of PCA for target species, which accounted for 32.43% of the total variance, showed evident decadal variation patterns with a step change during 1992- 1999 and inter-annual variability with short-period fluctuation, respectively. It seems that PC1 was associated with large scale climatic change, while PC2 was related to inter-annual oceanographic variability such as ENSO events. Linear fitting results showed winEOFl had significant effect on PC1,and GAM analysis for PC1 showed that winter EOF1 (winEOFl) and summer EOF2 (sumEOF2) can explain 88.9% of the total variance. Nonlinear effect was also found between PC2 and winEOFl, indicating that the fish community structure, which had predominantly decadal/inter-annual variation patterns, was influenced by inter-annual variations in oceanographic conditions.