The relation between previous Pacific SST and summer rainfall in China is investigated through the agency of canonical correlation analysis (CCA). Evidence suggests that the first canonical pattern of the SST predictor has its seasonal distribution as follows: the SE part is higher in values than the NW in autumn, the east and west are lower than the central part in winter, the NW higher than the SE in spring and summer, and temporal variation of the canonical principal component pattern clearly reflects the El Nino episode. Also, the CCA-predicted summer precipitation experiments show that the rainfall response to the SST varies considerably from place to place and the forecast skill depends strongly upon the amount of correlativity between the rainfall index and canonical principal component.