Nowadays the fact of climate change and its profound effects on society and economy could not been ignored or avoided any more. Mitigation and adaptation are the two indispensable ways to handle. Climate change since the 1980s in Xinjiang, such as the appreciable raise of temperature and the increase of frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events,has been threating the sustainable development of regional water resources, farming system, livestock husbandry,et al. For straddling the Eurasia,Xinjiang is very sensitive to climate change, so it undoubtedly could help the policy-makers to make decisions to cope with the potential adversities caused by climate change to analyze the temporal and spatial features of adaptive capacity to climate change. In this study, the methods of the evidence theory employed to decide the weight,grey synthesis analysis and socio-economic statistic data were used to assess the adaptive capacity to climate change in Xinjiang. The results revealed that: Firstly, the adaptive capacity of whole Xinjiang had been continually increased since the 8th Five-year Plan period (1991 - 1995),especially during the two periods from the 9th Five-year Plan period (1996 - 2000) to the 10th Five-year Plan period (2001 - 2005) and from the 11th Five-year Plan period (2006 - 2010) to the 12th Five-year Plan period (2011 - 2013); Secondly, there was merely a little change of adaptive capacity in all the districts during the period of 2004 - 2013 except in Karamay City,and the distribution of relative rankings of adaptive capacity in all the districts became more decentralized or centralized. The compared results revealed that the average adaptive capacity was slightly decreased in 6 districts of the total 14 districts during the periods of 2004 - 2008 and 2009 - 2013; Thirdly, the districts with low adaptive capacity were mainly distributed in southwest Xinjiang, the adaptive capacity in Urumqi City and Karamay City was the highest,and that in other districts was moderate.