Based on the observed daily temperature and precipitation of the land surface of 603 meteorological stations in China, the Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies (GIMMS) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) 3rd generation dataset, the changing patterns of NDVI in China during 1982-2015 were investigated and the corresponding contributions of the main driving forces, climatic change and human activities, to these changes were distinguished using the methods of trend analysis and multiple regression residuals analysis. The results showed that vegetation recovered in whole China in research period significantly. Shanghai was the single case with a decrease in growing season NDVI in the selected 32 provincial-level administrative regions, while the growing season NDVI in Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Chongqing increased much faster compared with other regions. The climatic change and human activities drove the NDVI change jointly as main forces in China and induced both a rapid increasing trend on the whole and a huge spatial difference. The impacts of climatic change on NDVI change in the growing-season ranged from -0.01×10 ^-3 a ^-1 to 1.05×10 ^-3 a ^-1, while the impacts of human activities changed from -0.32×10 ^-3 a ^-1 to 1.77×10 ^-3 a ^-1. The contributions of climatic change and human activities accounted for 40% and 60%, respectively, to the increase of NDVI in China in the past 34 years. The regions where the contribution rates of human activities were more than 80% were mainly distributed in the central part of the Loess Plateau, the North China Plain, and the northeast and the southwest of China. There were 22 provincial-level regions where the contributions of human activities were more than 50%, and the shares of contribution induced by human activities in Shanghai, Heilongjiang, and Yunnan were much greater than those of any other regions. The results suggest that we should focus more on the role of human activities in vegetation restoration in the whole country.