China’s National Parks Raise Questions About Conservation and Community Rights

China’s national park expansion has drawn international conservation groups and attention for its promise to protect wildlife. But the experience of Tibetans and other local communities raises a harder question: can conservation succeed when the people who have cared for those lands are removed from them?

The initiative was announced in 2015, with Sanjiangyuan as its first major park. The area is 13,000 square miles larger than Germany and 14 times the size of Yellowstone National Park in the United States. State media has described its alpine ecosystems and rivers as unspoiled. Yet the landscape has long been home to communities, including Tibetan nomads whose knowledge and land use are part of its history.

Of the 10 parks initially planned, four, including Sanjiangyuan, lie in areas that had been part of an independent Tibet before China’s 1950 invasion. Kyinzom Dhongdue, a former member of the Tibetan Parliament in exile and a human rights activist based in Australia, says conservation messaging can obscure the consequences of Chinese control. “The environmental movement is in danger of normalizing what China is doing and without really looking at the darker side of these programs,” she says.

The concern extends beyond Tibet. In Xinjiang, home to Turkic Uyghur and Kazakh communities, and in Inner Mongolia, park designations and ecotourism projects have reportedly displaced residents from land inhabited across generations. Park administrators and tourism businesses have taken over some of those areas. Available data is incomplete, but reports cited by the source describe tens of thousands of Tibetan nomads and villagers being relocated, often to newly built urban settlements in less desirable locations. The number of Uyghur and Mongolian residents affected is not established.

Conservation’s human footprint

International organizations helped shape China’s park program. The Nature Conservancy introduced the national park idea to Chinese authorities as early as 1997 and supported exchanges on park management. Conservation International says it helped conserve 4.9 million acres in China; one of its early projects was in southeastern Tibet. For many conservation groups, the 2015 announcement represented a significant opportunity to protect habitats and species.

That work has focused attention on animals such as snow leopards, giant pandas, yaks and Tibetan antelopes. But estimates cited by National Geographic put the population inside the initial 10 parks at 652,600 people. The image of empty wilderness therefore misses a central fact: these are inhabited places, where conservation decisions affect livelihoods, settlement and access to land.

Dhongdue says removing residents while placing park management in outside hands repeats a pattern in which local custodians lose control of the ecosystems they have maintained. “These parks are displacing the very same people who have lived on and looked after those lands for generations,” she says.

The history of U.S. national parks offers a warning. Yosemite’s creation expelled Miwok and Ahwahneechee people, while the park was promoted to visitors as untouched wilderness. At least 26 Indigenous groups were displaced from other U.S. parks and monuments, including Glacier, Yellowstone and Shenandoah. For decades, the human costs received little attention. Some U.S. conservation organizations have since acknowledged that record and begun addressing their role in excluding Native peoples.

The comparison has limits: the political systems and circumstances differ. But the history shows how conservation can protect habitats while erasing the people who shaped and sustained them. The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International and WWF now state that conservation should involve local and Indigenous communities. Critics say those commitments should also guide their work in China, where public dissent is tightly constrained and Tibetan and Uyghur communities face heightened surveillance and censorship.

Local knowledge and ecological outcomes

Displacement can affect ecosystems as well as communities. Dawa Lokyitsang, a Tibetan anthropologist and postdoctoral fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in the Netherlands, traces mining, deforestation and river damming in Tibet to the period following the 1950 invasion. She describes these activities as a long-running pattern of industrial resource extraction.

Research increasingly recognizes that people can be active parts of ecosystems, including in places often presented as wilderness. Indigenous communities have shaped environments such as the Amazon, and removing people from a landscape can alter ecological conditions. In Tibet, Dhongdue argues, traditional knowledge should inform park management rather than be sidelined.

A report published by the Institute for Security & Development Policy presents evidence linking the removal of Tibetans from high-altitude areas with increased erosion, biodiversity loss and land degradation. Those findings challenge the assumption that fewer residents automatically mean healthier habitats. They also make community participation a practical conservation question: local knowledge can help managers understand how land, water and wildlife respond to changes in use.

Researchers and advocates say the public record remains limited, making it difficult to assess the full scale of relocation or measure long-term ecological effects. That uncertainty strengthens the case for transparent information about who lives within park boundaries, how relocation decisions are made and what monitoring shows after residents leave.

Conservation groups under pressure

Conservation organizations once highlighted their China projects in reports, and journalists were invited to visit parks such as Sanjiangyuan and Giant Panda National Park. Some showcased projects provided housing or entry-level park jobs to Tibetans. Critics argue that such examples did not answer broader questions about displacement, community authority and rights.

WWF China, The Nature Conservancy and Conservation International declined interview requests for the source story. Snow Leopard Trust, the Paulson Institute and the Chinese nonprofit Shan Shui did not respond. Dhongdue says she encountered similar reluctance while researching a 2019 report on Tibetan nomads and land displacement.

Independent Tibet researcher Gabriel Lafitte believes organizations limit what they say because their ability to operate in China depends on working within constraints set in Beijing. A 2016 law requires foreign nonprofits operating in China to submit annual plans for approval. The source also reports that statements made by overseas staff can put Chinese colleagues at risk of threats or detention. Such pressures can narrow public discussion of environmental programs even when conservation groups have raised concerns about colonial histories elsewhere.

The central test for China’s parks is therefore broader than whether they protect flagship species. It is whether management recognizes residents as participants in conservation, publishes evidence about relocation and ecological change, and accounts for the knowledge built through generations of living on the land. Without those measures, parks may preserve scenery and wildlife while weakening both community rights and the stewardship on which lasting protection depends.