Climate change and human activities are the main driving forces of vegetation dynamics. However, sensitivity to external disturbance and environment is different among different vegetation types. Knowledge of dynamics of different vegetation types in related to climatic changes and anthropogenic activities is thus critical for understanding the driving mechanism of vegetation changes and developing ecological protection strategies. During the past decades, China has experienced dramatic climate and land use/land cover changes, and the vegetation cover has changed significantly. However, most studies focused on the attribution of vegetation change in a single vegetation type. Vegetation dynamics and its response to climate change and human activities based on different vegetation types remains unknown in China. Therefore, it is necessary to enhance an understanding of contributions of climate change and human activities among different vegetation types in China. Based on the trend analysis, residual analysis and scenario simulation methods, this paper investigated the spatial and temporal changes of different vegetation types in China using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) during 2000-2015, and distinguished the relative role of climatic change and human activities. Results indicated that: (1) vegetation NDVI showed an increasing trend in China during 2000-2015, with a proportion of 84.1%. Moreover, the increasing trend can be divided into two stages: the rapid rise stage during 2000-2005 (with a rate of 0.0074/a) and the slow rise stage during 2000-2015 (with a rate of 0.0024/a). Among various vegetation types, the forest vegetation showed the best improvement tendency with significantly increased area accounting for 82.4% of total forest area, while desert vegetation improved relatively poor, with only 22.3% of the area where vegetation increased significantly. (2) Vegetation changes in China were mainly affected by human activities. The relative roles of human activities in vegetation improvement areas and in vegetation degradation areas were 76.4% and 60.0%, respectively. Moreover, its impact was more related to management methods than the change of land use types. (3) The responses of different vegetation types to climate change and human activities varied greatly. In vegetation improvement areas, with the exception of marshes vegetation, the contributions of human activities to vegetation changes were more than 70%, especially to crops with 80.7%. In vegetation degradation areas, marshes and crops vegetation were most affected by human activities, indicating that marshes in China suffered the negative effects of more intensive human interference in 2000-2015. Therefore, regional governments should strive to improve ecological quality of various vegetation types, especially dominant vegetation, to promote the local ecological construction.