•This study documents two episodes of Paleoproterozoic mafic intrusive suites from the NCC.•The Haicheng suite comes from newly metasomatized lithospheric mantle.•The Guohua suite originates from a cratonic sub-continental lithospheric mantle.•Two suites witnessed a tectonic shift in from continental arc to post-orogenic regime. Mafic dyke swarms constitute a common occurrence within the cratonic provinces in the world since the Archean–Proterozoic boundary and their geneses harbor critical information for facilitating regional tectonic and supercontinental reconstruction. This zircon U–Pb dating and geochemical study documents two episodes of Paleoproterozoic mafic intrusions from Liaoning province, North China Craton (NCC): the Haicheng suite (HCS) with an emplacement age of ca. 2125 Ma from the Liaodong Peninsula and the Guohua suite (GHS) with an age of ca. 1816 Ma from the western Liaoning terrane. The HCS meta-gabbros are tholeiitic in composition with an SiO2 range from 46 to 52%, modest enrichment in light rare earth elements (LREE) and depletion in high field strength elements (HFSE), and possess radiogenic whole-rock Nd (ɛNd(t)=+1.91 to +4.21) and zircon Hf (ɛHf(t)=+4.02 to +8.48) isotopic compositions. These features endow the HCS with a juvenile subduction fluid-metasomatized lithospheric mantle source. By contrast, the GHS exhibits a meta-gabbroic to -dioritic composition and a transitional character from tholeiitic to calc-alkali, with variably enriched LREEs and more evolved isotopic signatures (ɛNd(t)=−0.20 to −5.82, zircon ɛHf(t)=+0.09 to +4.91) than the HCS. While the relatively intact high-Fe gabbroic samples are supposed to represent partial melts from a fertile cratonic sub-continental lithospheric mantle source in the garnet±spinel stability field, the low-Fe dioritic ones tend to bear the imprints of subsequent assimilation and fractional crystallization process. Apart from making an important contribution to the present archive of the Paleoproterozoic mafic dyke swarms in the NCC, the present two mafic magmatic suites witnessed a shift in tectonic setting from a subduction-related continental arc environment to a post-orogenic extensional regime. Synthesizing two suites with coeval felsic igneous episodes as well as concomitant episodic metamorphic events in the Jiao-Liao-Ji belt leads to the characterization of a possible divergent double subduction system in the eastern NCC during the time span of ca. 2.2–1.80 Ga. Synchronized beating of episodic magmatic and metamorphic pulses in the constituent mobile belts of the NCC carries further implication of attesting to the ubiquity and importance of divergent double subduction system in the cratonic amalgamation and its incorporation within the supercontinent Columbia.