Abstract: Tourism activities in national parks serve as important vehicles for delivering public welfare services, facilitating nature education, and communicating the values of ecological civilization. Their implementation must be premised on the fulfillment of ecological conservation objectives. With China′s first five national parks as research subjects, this study reviews the current state of tourism development, spatial distribution, and management requirements, analyzes the overall characteristics and practical challenges of tourism activities within these parks, and constructs a framework for mode selection and differentiated management. The findings are as follows. Influenced by variations in resource endowments, primary conservation targets, and pre-existing tourism development foundations, the five parks feature a relatively diverse array of tourism activity types. Most tourism activities are concentrated in general control zones, relying primarily on existing scenic areas, visitor centers, designated activity nodes, roads, and trails. Services with a stronger dependency on facilities, such as accommodation and dining, are largely provided by gateway communities and surrounding areas outside the park boundaries. Meanwhile, tourism management is transitioning from conventional visitor-flow control toward conservation-oriented, full-process visitor management approach. The prominent challenges currently facing tourism activities in national parks include insufficient institutional support and management coordination, overly generalized spatial and intensity controls, and inadequate alignment between tourism activity offerings and the resource endowments and conservation values of national parks. Based on the requirements of ecological conservation and public welfare, tourism activities should follow four guiding principles: conservation priority, low-impact utilization, adaptive management, and public welfare sharing. According to the core objects on which tourism activities depend and the primary forms of visitor participation, suitable activities are categorized into five types: nature observation, nature education, research participation, cultural experience, and ecological recreation. Considering that the ecological impacts of tourism activities vary with season, spatial location, activity mode, and intensity of use, this paper develops a differentiated management framework across three dimensions: time, space, and incorporates visitor capacity into the specific management process. The opening periods and visitor volumes should be adjusted according to the life-history traits of core protected objects and the dynamic changes in the ecological environment. Activity nodes, routes, and service areas should be refined based on ecological sensitivity and spatial carrying capacity. Corresponding access conditions and capacity control measures should be established in response to the disturbance patterns, duration, and group sizes of different tourism activities. This study contends that tourism management in national parks should not be confined to simply permitting or prohibiting individual projects. Instead, it should establish a complete management chain encompassing baseline attribute assessment, implementation condition evaluation, activity type identification, differentiated access control, monitoring feedback, and dynamic adjustment, so as to better balance the relationships among ecological conservation, public sharing, and moderate utilization.