As one of the important parts of global climate change research, land use change plays a significant role in soil CO₂ emission. In karst area, vegetation has been restored in the process of rocky desertification control, accompanied by the change of land use, and its impact on soil CO₂ emission needs to be further clarified. Based on the controlled experiment, with the same initial conditions of soil and karst aqueous media but different land uses, the Shawan Test Site at Puding, Guizhou was chosen to study the emission law and influencing factors of soil CO₂. Through the soil CO₂ concentration and flux data in a hydrological year, our results demonstrated that:(1) the soil CO₂ concentration and flux showed obviously seasonal variations, and the soil CO₂ flux had apparent diurnal variation in different seasons. They were mainly controlled by temperature and rainfall. The former could increase the emission, while the latter could decrease the emission, and the increased or decreased degrees were related to land uses. (2) Farming activities affected the soil CO₂ emission as well. Due to the dissolution of the underlying carbonate rock in karst area, farming activities could make the soil loose and increase the diffusion of soil CO₂ to the aquifer, resulting in negative soil CO₂ flux of cultivated land in spring. (3) The annual emission of soil CO₂ under different land uses were grassland (897.53 tC km^-2 a^-1) > shrub land (258.15 tC km^-2 a^-1) > cultivated land (207.66 tC km^-2 a^-1) > bare soil land (92.68 tC km^-2 a^-1). It was found that they were mainly dominated by vegetation biomass and soil organic carbon content under different land uses. (4) The contents of soil organic carbon were grassland (29.33 g/kg) > shrub land (23.31 g/kg) > cultivated land (22.08 g/kg) > bare soil land (19.00 g/kg). Given the same initial properties of these soils, we found that with the change of land use, except for the soil organic carbon content in non-vegetated bare soil land decreased, the other types increased, and the increased degree was related to the degree of vegetation coverage. Therefore, land use types could control soil CO₂ emission by affecting the biomass of overlying vegetation and the soil organic carbon content, and the emission intensity is related to temperature, rainfall process and farming activities. Further, we think that the content of soil organic matter and soil carbon storage could be increased through the adjustment of land use.