This study used two regional climate model experiments to assess the impact of paddy irrigation in the Sichuan Basin, China, on the near‐surface temperature across East Asia: a control experiment (CTL run), which was used to calculate soil moisture using an unmodified land surface scheme and a sensitivity experiment (SEN run) that incorporated an increase in soil moisture over the basin at the beginning of the rice‐growing season. Although the near‐surface temperature in the Sichuan Basin was higher in the CTL run than in the observations, it improved in the SEN run because of a change in the Bowen ratio associated with the increase in soil moisture. In the SEN run, the modification of local‐scale land surface wetness in the basin causes the decrease in the near‐surface temperature over northeastern China and its increase over southern China relative to that in the CTL run because of a change in the cloud convection associated with precipitation, which, in turn, modifies the solar and net radiation at the surface and the partitioning into the sensible and latent heat fluxes. The greenhouse effect associated with an increase in precipitable water in the SEN run also influences near‐surface warming over southeastern China and the ocean north of southwestern Japan, where the impacts of radiation processes and surface heat fluxes on the near‐surface temperature are small. Consequently, these results suggest that local‐scale modifications to land surface wetness in the Sichuan Basin result in changes in the spatial distribution of near‐surface temperatures over a part of East Asia.