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Why is it that sometimes small droughts trigger serious crop losses while in other cases even large droughts do not have such a major effect? In this paper, we identify socio-economic indicators associated with sensitivity and resilience to drought for each of China's main grain crops (rice, wheat and corn). Provincial harvest and rainfall data (1961–2001) are used to calculate an annual “crop-drought vulnerability index”. We separate “sensitive cases” (where significant harvest losses occurred in years with only minor droughts) and “resilient cases” (where harvest losses were minimal despite there being a major drought) and explore the socio-economic characteristics of these different situations. Results show that sensitive cases were particularly common in economically poor landlocked provinces and in wealthy coastal areas that have a limited land base. In such “sensitive cases”, the size of the rural population and …