Restricted by the fragile physical environment, rapid economic development has resulted in substantial conflicts between production-living-ecology (PLE) land use in the karst regions of southwest China. Previous studies have taken land use change as a proxy of explicit land use conflict. However, implicit conflicts can also arise in regions where there are no changes in land use types and can be difficult to identify. In this study, both explicit and implicit PLE land use conflicts were defined and identified by our novel method for analyzing the occurrence, types, intensities, relationships, and driving factors of conflicts. The results show that, in contrast to the implicit conflicts, explicit conflicts exhibited local aggregation and a high degree of intensity and usually occurred around built-up areas. The Pareto frontier curves in implicit conflict zones were higher than those in explicit conflict zones, implying that explicit conflicts had a more pronounced impact on the decline in PLE function. The region 2 km around explicit conflict zones were considered to be a high-risk area for implicit conflict control. This study identified the explicit and implicit conflicts and determined their spatial correlation and statistical characteristics, which provided a basis for alleviating conflicts and optimizing PLE land uses.