It is of great importance for regional water resources assessment to correctly understand the trend of climate hydrological evolution in changing environment. Taking the Zhongxi River catchment in Shanxi Province as a case, historical variations and phases features of precipitation and runoff from 1958-2015 were investigated using Mann-Kendall method and cluster analysis method, and the precipitation-runoff relationships at different stages were analyzed. The results show that both the annual precipitation and runoff declined during 1958-2015 with linear decreasing rates of -1.05 mm/a and -1.62 mm/a, respectively. The years of 1970 and 1979 were detected as significant separating points of runoff series which showed three stages of changing characteristics. Runoff was highly correlated to precipitation in different phases; however, the relationships between runoff and precipitation are different in different phases, which is possibly due to the effect of human activities. It is essential to quantitatively identify contributions of changes in climate and human activities to runoff change in further studies.