Drought, as an extreme natural disaster event, can cause or exacerbate water, food, and national security hazards. However, because of differences in the regional characteristics and applicability of drought indices, a more comprehensive drought index is necessary for drought assessment over large areas. Here, we propose a new detrended combined climatologic deviation index (Detrended-CCDI), and monitor drought over China from 2002 to 2017 on the basis of pixels on pixels by Detrended-CCDI. Results show that Detrended-CCDI has recorded monthly drought distribution results for China from April 2002 to June 2017, which are similar to those recorded by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment - Drought Severity Index (GRACE-DSI), the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), the Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), and the China Flood and Drought Disaster Bulletin. Detrended-CCDI has a good drought monitoring capability and captures drought recovery more quickly. Three main drought characteristics identified by Detrended-CCDI is similar to those demonstrated by other indices. The drought trend obtained by Detrended-CCDI is similar to that obtained by GRACE-DSI, but is more accurate and can detect more trends associated with becoming wetter or drier than PDSI and SPEI. The drought frequency obtained using Detrended-CCDI was lower than those identified by other indices, due to Detrended-CCDI combines all water layer and precipitation data. The regional drought events obtained by Detrended-CCDI and GRACE-DSI were almost identical (kappa average > 0.8), higher than those obtained by other indices. Our findings provide scientific guidance for drought monitoring and assessment over China.