Abstract:Establishing the national park system is an important reform task of the 3rd Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and also a major part of the reform for promoting ecological civilization of China. The 19th CPC National Congress pointed out that China will develop a natural reserve system mainly composed by national parks, which confirmed the importance of the national park system in the reform of China's ecological civilization. Since 2015, China has successively set up 10 pilot programs for establishing national parks. Based on in-depth investigations on 10 pilot programs, the study assessed the progress of the pilot programs and supported the overall plan on the development and management of national parks. The results show that pilot programs of national park system in China have made enormously positive progress in protected areas integration, national park legislation, collective land use regulatory, management system construction, and community development mechanism. However, restricted by current laws and regulations, management system, human resources, and scientific supporting capacity, the progress of pilot programs lags in terms of determining and registering ownership of natural resources, administrative mechanism of cross-administrative region, diversified funding mechanism, franchise, and conservation concession mechanism. We propose that the systematic pilot program should focus on resolving current conflicts, so as to enhance the implementation of various unfinished reform tasks. To establish a more robust national park system, we suggest that a comprehensive reform should further be promoted, such as promoting the optimization and system update of natural protection system, launching natural reserve and national park legislation, establishing the mechanisms of jointly building and sharing, multi-entity governance, natural capital appreciation, and scientific decision-making.