There are several cold extremes happened in East Asia countries in recent years, such as 2007-2008, 2009-2010, and 2012-2013 winters.The traditional climatic attributions, like AO/NAO and ENSO, fail to explain most of these events.We propose a new and major potential link between autumn Arctic sea-ice extent and winter surface temperatures over East Asia.The extent of Arctic sea-ice on November are found to be closely correlated with surface air temperature over East Asia on December and January.In particular, this link might be an independent process from NAO induced teleconnection and therefore has the potential to be used to improve seasonal prediction as one of the key climatic indicators for EA countries.The main processes behind that mainly occurred within lower-mid troposphere in extreme negative sea-ice anomaly years, are associated with weakened (strengthened) zonal (meridional) circulations and strengthened southward transport of polar cold air through Ural Mountains and the eastern Siberia on December and January separately.