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East Asia has experienced long-term warming and drying in the twentieth century. However, a phenomenon known as the 'warming hiatus' changed the trend of enhanced soil drying over East Asia. In contrast to the previous long-term drying in the last century, time series of soil moisture showed a shift from a downtrend to uptrend around 2005, and prominent wetting was located in the northeast (semiarid and dry subhumid regions) and southeast of China (extreme humid regions). Our results illustrated that such abrupt change in soil moisture was closely related to the change of warming during hiatus. The warming hiatus played a more important role in decadal soil wetting over these semiarid and dry subhumid regions, compared to relatively limited influence of surface atmosphere temperature over humid regions. The weakened drying during the hiatus decade suggests that the response of wetting/drying to climate in drylands is closely related to decadal surface atmosphere temperature, which will deepen our understanding of the mechanism on the role of surface atmosphere temperature in the process of wetting/drying in drylands over different time scales.