Abstract:

Background & Aims: As a core component of China’s protected area system, national parks play a critical role in biodiversity conservation, ecological security, and regional sustainable development. With the ongoing advancement of the national park system reform and implementation of the National Park Law of the People’s Republic of China (hereafter referred to as the National Park Law), sustainable development research on national parks has become an important topic in recent studies. 

Methods: Grounded in the National Park Law, this study integrates literature related to the sustainable development of national parks published in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database from 2016 to 2025. By combining legal text analysis with bibliometric methods, this study systematically examines policy-oriented sustainability themes, major research topics, and their evolutionary trajectories. 

Results: Through a comparative analysis between policy-derived keywords and research keywords, this study reveals the degree of alignment and divergence between research hotspots and policy priorities. The results indicate that: (1) sustainability-related policy terms in the National Park Law are relatively evenly distributed across ecological, social, and governance dimensions, with a greater emphasis on the ecological dimension; (2) research on the sustainable development of China’s national parks has shown a rapid growth trend, with research themes shifting from institutional exploration toward integrated issues involving ecological conservation, community development, and governance mechanisms; (3) a high degree of alignment exists between academic research and the National Park Law in areas such as ecological protection, biodiversity conservation, and ecotourism, whereas significant research gaps remain in institutional aspects, including ecosystem integrity, science-based conservation, and integrated management. 

Conlusions: This study identifies priorities for future research. Future research should focus on integrated analyses of social–ecological systems, strengthen evaluations of governance mechanisms within a rule-of-law framework, explore synergistic pathways between ecological conservation and sustainable use, and promote the application of multi-scale dynamic monitoring approaches. The results provide a scientific basis for advancing the sustainable development of China’s national parks and improving their management effectiveness.

Key words: protected areas, sustainability, National Park Law, ecotourism, bibliometric analysis, visualization