Abstract: In recent decades, global climate change is one of the main concerns around the world. Land use change and the high demand for fossil fuel have caused severe consequences of climate change, such as elevated greenhouse gases, warming, and altering precipitation pattern. These combined factors have substantial impacts on ecosystem processes, especially carbon and nitrogen cycles in terrestrial ecosystems. Since the 1970s, a series of field manipulative experiments had been set up to stimulate the influences of monofactorial and/or multifactorial climate changes, improving our understanding of ecosystem response and feedback to global change. In this review, we summarized the development history of global change experiments, and discussed the main issues of using field manipulative experiments in simulating global change. The application of multifactorial experiments, such as CO₂ enrichment, warming, precipitation and nitrogen deposition, were highlighted in the research of soil microbial ecology. Moreover, the response and feedback of soil biota as well as the biogeochemical processes that they mediated were further addressed. We also proposed the prospects of their application in global change research to explore the impact of global change on terrestrial ecosystems.