The assessment of wind resource is the basis of wind power utilization. An accurate and comprehensive characterization of wind resource is of vital importance to site planning, wind turbine selection, generation capacity estimation, back-up requirements estimation, and financial risks estimation, etc. The second Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA-2) dataset from 1998 to 2017 is used to construct the wind profiles at 80 m, 100 m and 150 m heights in China. To ensure the reliability of the assessment, the wind speed obtained from MERRA-2 is compared with the observations collected from two wind farms and 213 meteorological stations. Then a series of metrics are employed to comprehensively characterize wind resource in China, including the theoretical potential, variability, intermittency and complementarity. Meanwhile, the variation pattern of each metric with height is analyzed. The characterization results contribute to a better and more comprehensive understanding of wind resource in China. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.