To investigate the community structure of soil archaea in saline-alkaline land and their distribution characters responding to soil anion, the saline-alkaline land soils were collected from different area in China, including Heilongjiang soda saline-alkaline soil (HA), Xinjiang desert saline-alkaline soil (XD), Shanxi plain saline-alkaline soil (SY), Jiangsu coastal saline-alkaline soil (JD) and Tianjin coastal saline-alkaline soil (TB). The high-throughput sequencing technology based on Illumina-Hiseq was used, and 489~604 archaeal operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were obtained. The results of OTU diversity analysis showed that the species richness of archaeal community in XD was the highest. The diversity and evenness of archaeal community in SY and HA was highest and lowest, respectively. The OTU species annotation results showed the Thaumarchaeota was the predominant phylum in HA, and Euryarchaeota was dominant phylum in the other four soil samples. Based on the archaeal community structure, dominant archaeal genus and soil anion of five samples, the Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA) showed that the archaeal community structure in XD and Haloterrigena (the most dominant in XD, 20.2%) responsed to the concentration of SO₄^2-, the archaeal community structure in HA and Nitrososphaera (the most dominant in HA, 62.3%) responsed to the concentration of HCO₃^-/CO₃^2- and pH value; the archaeal community structure of JD、SY and TB and Halorubrum (the most dominant in JD and TB, 24.4% and 15.6%) and Natronomonas (the second dominant in SY and JD, 8.1% and 9.2%) responsed to the concentration of Cl^-. Thus, the archaeal community structure and distribution characteristics in saline-alkaline soils in China were affected by the types of anions and their concentrations. The results of this study contribute to not only the resources excavation of archaeal strains, but also the revealing of the ecological functions of archaeal communities in the different types of saline-alkaline soil in China.