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Speleothem records in southeastern China provide key evidence for past environmental changes. However, the climatic interpretation of these proxies has remained a great controversy. Earlier work interprets the cave δ¹⁸O signal associated with regional rainfall of the East Asia Summer Monsoon (EASM) or monsoon rainfall upstream of China. Recent isotope modeling supports the latter but show little correspondence between the precipitation δ¹⁸O and rainfall in China. Here, we examine the evolution of the climate and precipitation δ¹⁸O for the last 21,000 years in models and observations. Recognizing the regional difference of the EASM rainfall, we propose an interpretation of the Chinese δ¹⁸O record that reconciles its representativeness of EASM and its driving mechanism of upstream depletion. The δ¹⁸O records do represent the intensity of the EASM system. The monsoon intensity is best characterized by …