<p>Whether the previous vegetation greening trend in China has persisted into the recent warmest decade and how the exceptional climate conditions of 2023 affected long-term change in vegetation greenness remain unexplored. Here we integrated two decades of remotely sensed normalized difference vegetation index data with climate records to reveal a persistent greening (referring to the increasing trend of vegetation greenness) of China, occurring at a rate triple the global average, while the greening signal varies geographically. A prominent greening trend is primarily driven by the greening of humid and subhumid regions, consistent with the expected effects of rising CO₂ on vegetation growth and intensified human practices including agricultural intensification and ambitious afforestation programs. By contrast, semi-arid and arid ecosystems showed non-significant greenness change due to drastic warming and precipitation fluctuations. The exceptional warming and precipitation reduction in 2023 did not trigger a record-high decrease in vegetation greenness when integrated across China. The vegetation greenness in 2023 instead reached the third highest on record which is contributed by enhancement in North China, Northeast China, and the Tibetan Plateau. Climatic extremes in 2023 induced significant browning in the Loess Plateau, Inner Mongolia, and Southwest China. While ecosystems especially in the southern China demonstrated relatively high resilience to climatic extreme events like high-temperature extremes and droughts, autumn greenness in 2023 can recover to levels even higher than the 2020–2022 average, despite significant browning in spring and summer. We, therefore, suggested that the 2023 climate extremes would not produce a new baseline from which vegetation growth will transition towards a state of degradation at both regional and national scales.</p>