Abstract: The construction of nature reserves serves as a critical pathway for conserving biodiversity and national strategic biological resources and for building a national ecological security framework. It also represents an important practice in advancing ecological civilization construction and building a Beautiful China. Since reform and opening-up, China′s nature reserve undertaking has progressed through four developmental stages, achieving historic accomplishments and accumulating rich experience. During the restoration, reconstruction, and preliminary exploration stage (1978—1984), the country fully restarted the construction of nature reserves, created a large number of new reserves, set up specialized management agencies, and actively conducted scientific surveys and functional zoning. The standardized construction stage (1985—1994) witnessed the successive introduction of a series of management regulations, laws, and statutes. Moreover, efforts were made to explore pathways that balanced resource conservation and utilization, and a nationwide protected area system gradually took shape. After entering the 21st century, the guiding ideology of China′s nature reserve development underwent a fundamental transformation from an emphasis on the speed of expansion to a focus on the quality of construction. The country formulated systematic development plans, initiated nature reserve construction projects, and continuously improved management systems. In particular, the central government has accelerated the construction of ecological civilization systems and explicitly called for the creation of a national park system since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. This milestone has ushered China′s nature reserve efforts into a new development stage led by national parks. At present, a protected area classification system and management mechanism, one that is rooted in China′s national conditions, takes national parks as the mainstay, nature reserves as the foundation, and various natural parks as supplements, is gradually established. In the course of continuously promoting nature reserve construction, the Party and the government have accumulated a wealth of valuable experience: upholding institutional implementation and promoting the standardization of nature conservation through legal means; upholding planning guidance and fostering systematic development of conservation endeavors through strategic design; upholding institutional innovation and resolving tensions between conservation and development through management reform; upholding the priority of protection and realizing rational resource use on the premise of protection; and upholding opening-up and drawing on international experience to continuously enrich China′s own solutions. A systematic review of the experience and lessons of nature reserve construction helps clarify the internal logic underlying the evolution of China′s nature conservation institutions and offers useful references for improving the governance system of protected areas in the new era.