Drought is one of the important abiotic factors restricting plant growth and development and causing reduction in crop productivity. While drought stress results in water imbalance and consequently oxidative stress in plants, salt stress creates more complicated patterns of stresses such as ion toxicity, etc., in addition to dehydration stress. Eventually, both type of stresses will result in a metabolic disorder and affect the normal growth of plants. In responding to the two types of stresses, plants have developed various kinds of strategic measures to minimize the stress damages, such as reducing the osmotic potential and water potential through osmoregulation, so as to enhance the ability of the stressed plants to water absorption from soil. Under drought stress and certain intensity of soil salinity, cell membrane potential with internal negative and external positive and Na⁺ electrochemical potential gradient created by extracellular Na⁺ concentration will favor Na⁺ passive transport from the external environment to inside plant cells, that is, drought conditions will induce more Na⁺ absorption and accumulation by plants. Because plants can accumulate more osmoregulation substance under the premise of consuming less energy by absorbing inorganic ions such as Na⁺, the existence of proper amount of soil salt may be beneficial rather than adverse for plants to combat drought stress. In this study, growth, photosynthetic rate, antioxidant enzyme activity and water status during drought were measured in seedlings of arrowleaf saltbush (Atriplex triangularis) grown in pots with different soil salinity, in order to investigate the effect of soil salinity on drought resistance of the plants. The results showed that drought stress inhibited the plantlet growth, but the amount of growth height and net photosynthetic rate in seedlings watered with 0.1-0.4 mol/L NaCl (dry + 0.1-0.4 mol/L NaCl) were significantly higher than watered with 0 mol/L NaCl (dry) during the period of treatment, and the latter led to obvious damage of the leaf photosynthetic apparatus. Meanwhile, the activity change of superoxide dismutase (SOD)、peroxidase (POD) and catalase (CAT) in leaves with dry + 0.1-0.4 mol/L NaCl treatment were significantly lower than dry-only treatment, and the malondialdehyde (MDA) content of the former was also significantly lower than the latter. In addition, compared the water status in soil and plantlet and the Na⁺ content in arrowleaf saltbush leaves with the dry-only, dry + 0.1-0.4 mol/L NaCl showed the decline of the relative water content in soil and leaf was slow, Na⁺ content and cell tugor in arrowleaf saltbush leaves were significantly increased. This implied that dry + 0.1-0.4 mol/L NaCl were able to increase the reservation of water in the soil, and increase the accumulation of Na⁺ in the leaves, meanwhile decrease the osmotic potential and enhance the driving forces for water absorption. These all show that a moderate salt stress could increase Na⁺ absorption and accumulation in arrowleaf saltbush, decrease the osmotic potential of the tissues, maintain water absorption and retention, mitigate the destruction in the cell membrane and photosynthetic apparatus caused by drought dehydration, maintain a higher production capacity and growth, thus improve the capability of arrowleaf saltbush to resist drought stress.