Determining the applicability of a drought index to a specific area is a prerequisite for drought quantification and mapping on a regional scale. In this paper, we explored the effectiveness of the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) in northeast China. SPEI values at a time scale of 1, 3, 6, and 12 months were calculated using a daily climate dataset that had been collected by 90 meteorological stations in northeast China from 1961 to 2014. The climate variables analyzed included daily temperature, precipitation, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, relative humidity, and sunshine duration. The applicability of the SPEI for drought quantification in northeast China was investigated using Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test, validation analysis from specific drought events and soil moisture, and correlation analyses between SPEI and the statistics of the area suffering from drought.The results showed that our null hypothesis was rejected by the K-S Test at a 0.05 significance level for each station, and that the Log-logistic distribution matched very well to the water surplus or deficit series for all four time scales at each station. The drought-affected areas showed a significant negative relationship to the SPEI during the growing season (April to September) at these four time scales during 1971-2013. The index of SPEI01 was found to be more suitable for predicting the time, location, and intensity of drought events. There was a strong positive correlation between soil moisture at a depth of 20 cm and the SPEI for most of the climate stations (90.2% of stations for SPEI01, 92.16% of stations for SPEI03, 90.2% of stations for SPEI06 and 88.24% of stations for SPEI12). In addition, the number of climate stations decreased as the time scale increased. Our results indicate that the SPEI is suitable for quantifying droughts, and therefore, should be widely used in scientific drought prediction research in Northeast China.