East Asia is located in the southeast part of the Eurasian continent. It is bordered on the east by the Pacific Ocean and on the southwest by the Tibetan Plateau. The unique geographic features produce distinct climate characteristics over this region. A workshop was held on 18–20 October 1994 at the State University of New York at Albany to discuss this topic, and the participants agreed to embark a collaborative research project, “General Circulation Model (GCM) Simulations of the East Asian Climate (EAC)”. The objectives are to assess the ability of GCMs to simulate EAC, and to study the mechanisms and factors that cause the multi-scales climate variability. The project was subsequently listed as the Subproject #25 in the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP)–Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) with Wei-Chyung Wang as the Coordinator; and Yihui Ding, Guo-Xiong Wu, Huang-Hsiung Hsu, Akio Kitoh, and Jeong-Woo Kim as members. 
Over the years, twelve workshops were organized to present and discuss collaborative research progress; and three journal Special Issues were published: 2001 and 2008 in Climate Dynamics, and 2004 in the Journal of Climate.