In this study, the high-accuracy multisource integrated Chinese land cover (MICLCover) dataset was used in version 4 of the Community Land Model (CLM4) to assess how the new land cover information affected land surface simulation over China. Compared to the default land cover dataset in CLM4, the MICL data indicated lower values for bare soil (14.6% reduction), needleleaf tree (3.6%), and broadleaf tree (1.9%); higher values for shrub cover (1.8% increase), grassland (9.9%), cropland (5.0%), glaciers (0.5%), lakes (1.6%), and wetland (1.1%); and unchanged for urban areas. Two comparative CLM4 simulations were conducted for the 33-yr period from 1972 to 2004, one using the MICL dataset and the other using the default dataset. The results revealed that the MICL data produced a 0.3% lower mean annual surface albedo over China than the original data. The largest contributor to the reduced value was semiarid regions (2.1% reduction). The MICL-data albedo value agreed more closely with observations (MODIS broadband black-sky albedo products) over arid and semiarid regions than for the original data to some extent. The simulated average sensible heat flux over China increased by only 0.1 W m–2 owing to the reduced values in arid and semiarid regions, as opposed to increases in humid and semihumid regions, while an increased latent heat flux of 1 W m–2 was reflected in almost identical changes over the whole region. In addition, the mean annual runoff simulated by CLM4 using MICL data decreased by 6.8 mm yr–1, primarily due to large simulated decreases in humid regions.