Soil organic carbon (SOC) pool is the largest carbon (C) reservoir in the terrestrial biosphere, and SOC storage in agricultural soils is extremely sensitive to the management practices such as tillage, fertilization, and crop residue management. Consequently, quantifying the changes in SOC resulting from the implementation of agricultural management practices is important for improving soil fertility, maintaining crop yield, and offsetting the emission of carbon dioxide. A total of 1146 paired-treatment data derived from the 102 published fertilization experiments (1994-2011) and meta-analysis method were employed in this study for characterizing the changes in topsoil organic carbon contents under different fertilization treatments in uplands of China. In order to identify the spatiotemporal changes in SOC and the variations of SOC change resulting from cropping system, initial SOC content, and duration of the experiments, meta-analysis was conducted by using the Meta package of R software (a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics), and then the changes in SOC contents were analyzed by taking the relative change rate (RC) of SOC as an appropriate effect size estimator in the analysis so that the treatment and control means of the experiments can be compared directly. Results showed that all fertilization treatments significantly sequestrated C in soils when compared with the control treatment. The RC of SOC under NPKM (mineral nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and manure) treatment was the largest, with a rate of 0.38 g kg^-1a^-1, while the P (mineral phosphorus only) treatment caused the lowest RC with 0.032g kg^-1a^-1. The RCs of SOC under fertilization treatments with manure incorporation were obviously higher than those treated only by inorganic chemical fertilizers. The regional characters of RCs under manure or inorganic fertilizer treatments, presenting as a magnitude order, can be identified as South > North China (NC) > Northwest (NW) > Northeast (NE), but such magnitude order changed when manure and inorganic fertilizers were applied simultaneously. Moreover, the RCs of SOC derived from the experimental data that observed in the early stage of the experiments (before 1990) were obviously higher than those obtained in the middle (1991-2000) or later (2001-2010) stage of the experiment. Furthermore, the accumulating effects of SOC resulting from fertilization treatments were also different for single and double cropping system. In the situation of joint use of manure and inorganic fertilizer, the RCs of SOC under single-season cropping system were higher than those under double-season cropping system, otherwise, an opposite trend in SOC change can be observed. The application of manure may diminish the variations of changes in SOC for different cropping systems, but the impacts of initial SOC content on the RCs of SOC were unclear. The SOC sequestration potential may be overestimated when only short-term experiment (duration <11a) data were used for the estimation, because the experimental duration time had significant influences on the RCs of SOC under different fertilization treatments.