Originally published 2017-04-26.
PBS
In 2017 China announced a plan for a single, giant protected area in its north-east for two of the world's rarest big cats, the Siberian (Amur) tiger and the Amur leopard. The pilot park launched that year across Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces, on the borders with Russia and North Korea, and in October 2021 it was formally established as the Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park, one of China's first five national parks. At about 14,100 square kilometres, it is roughly 60 per cent larger than Yellowstone.
Here is why the park was created, how many cats actually live there, what has gone right since 2017, and which popular claims about it need correcting.
Why China needed a new kind of park
Before 2017, wildlife in north-east China was spread across what Science magazine described in 2016 as a "mishmash" of national reserves, semi-protected forests and provincial parks. Each was run by a different authority, with different rules, and many were too small for animals that need huge home ranges. A male Amur tiger can patrol hundreds of square kilometres, so a patchwork of small reserves separated by farms, roads and logging concessions left tigers crossing unprotected land almost every time they moved.
The answer was a unified park under a single administration. The plan, approved in 2016 and launched as a pilot in 2017, stitched existing reserves and state forests together in the southern Changbai Mountains. Mines and industrial sites inside the boundary were closed, snares and fences removed, feeding points for prey set up, and damaged habitat restored. By the time it became a full national park, its management office reported that at least 12 tiger cubs and 11 leopard cubs had been born inside its borders since 2017.
The park also fits a wider national project. China has said it wants a national park system on the scale of its economic ambitions, and in 2015 the New York Times reported that officials were openly studying the US National Park Service, which grew into hundreds of sites during America's own industrial boom.
How many tigers and leopards are there?
The numbers are small, which is exactly why the park matters. Most of the world's wild Amur tigers live across the border in the Russian Far East. A detailed Russian census in 2015 counted about 560 wild tigers there, and a 2022 estimate put the figure near 750, including cubs.
China's share is much smaller. In 2005 fewer than about 20 tigers were thought to live in the country. Camera-trap surveys between 2013 and 2018 identified around 55 tigers across four north-eastern landscapes, and the strongest breeding population sits in the Laoyeling area, inside the new park. Chinese media in 2017 cited a rise from only six to nine tigers in the late 1990s to about 27 in the area by 2015; those early local figures are hard to compare with modern camera-trap counts, but the direction of travel is clear.
The Amur leopard is even rarer. Around 2007 only about 19 to 26 survived in the wild, all in south-eastern Russia and the bordering corner of China. Thanks to anti-poaching work, habitat protection and cross-border monitoring, estimates rose to roughly 128 to 130 adults and sub-adults by 2023. It remains listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN.
Correcting some common claims
"Tigers grow to 13 feet and 700 pounds"
This figure, often repeated online, is an exaggeration. The longest Amur tiger reliably measured was about 3.1 metres (just over 10 feet) including the tail. Modern wild males average roughly 176 kg (about 390 lb), and the heaviest radio-collared male weighed around 212 kg. Older reports of far larger animals are considered doubtful. Amur tigers are still among the largest cats on Earth, so there is no need to inflate them.
"The park protects pandas, Tibetan antelope and elephants"
It does not. Those species belong to other parts of China's national park programme: giant pandas to the Giant Panda National Park in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu, and Tibetan antelope to Three-River-Source on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. Asian elephants live in the far south-west. The north-eastern park is dedicated to tigers, leopards and the temperate forest ecosystem they depend on, which also shelters brown bears, red-crowned cranes and around 355 vertebrate species.
"It would be finished by 2020"
The 2017 plans aimed at about 14,600 square kilometres by 2020. The pilot phase ran until the formal establishment in 2021, and the official figure at that point was about 14,100 square kilometres, close to the original vision but not identical.
The threats that remain
Poaching has long been the biggest danger. Tiger bone, skins and other parts have a market rooted in traditional medicine and luxury goods. China banned hunting tigers in 1962 and outlawed the domestic trade in tiger bone in 1993, and international trade is forbidden under CITES. In 2018 the Chinese government announced it would relax the ban for some medical uses, then postponed the change after a global outcry. Snares set for deer and wild boar also kill and maim big cats by accident, which is why snare removal is a core job of park rangers.
Other pressures are quieter. Both cats depend on healthy populations of prey such as roe deer, sika deer and wild boar, so a forest emptied by hunting cannot hold them. Roads and development corridors split populations. The Amur leopard in particular suffers from very low genetic diversity, and a single disease outbreak, such as the canine distemper found in a wild leopard in 2015, could hit it hard. Human-caused forest fires, which turn woodland into grassland that leopards avoid, are another risk.
What makes a large park actually work
A big line on a map is only the start. Conservation biologists usually judge a park on a few practical questions:
- Connectivity: can animals move freely between this park and Russia's Land of the Leopard National Park and other forests across the border?
- Monitoring: the park relies on networks of camera traps and remote sensors, which let staff identify individual cats by their stripes and spots and spot poachers in real time.
- Local communities: villages inside and around the park need alternative livelihoods if logging, mining and cattle grazing are restricted, and support when livestock are lost to predators.
- Prey recovery: without enough deer and boar, tigers will either fail to breed or turn to livestock, which brings them into conflict with people.
The cub counts and camera-trap records since 2017 are encouraging, but researchers will want several more years of independent data before calling it a full success.
Why this matters beyond China
Big cats are what ecologists call umbrella species: protecting enough forest for a breeding population of tigers automatically protects thousands of other plants and animals. The north-east park also matters symbolically. China's wildlife reputation has suffered from poorly run tourist attractions, including tiger parks where overfed captive animals drew international criticism. A well-managed wild habitat offers a very different picture.
Conservation groups such as the World Wildlife Fund have worked on both sides of the border for decades, and the recovery of the Amur leopard from a few dozen animals shows how quickly numbers can improve when poaching is controlled and habitat is joined up. If the trend holds, the forests of Jilin and Heilongjiang could again become a lasting home for both cats.
Sources: Government of China: China's first national parks (October 2021); Wikipedia: Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park; Wikipedia: Siberian tiger; Wikipedia: Amur leopard. Originally reported by True Activist; image: PBS.
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