Abstract: National parks serve as institutional carriers of significant ecological value within China′s protected area system. In-depth public participation represents a vital pathway for highlighting the public welfare attributes of national parks and advancing collaborative governance. The Law of the People′s Republic of China on National Parks devotes a dedicated chapter to "participation and sharing", thereby furnishing a legal foundation for public involvement in national park governance. This paper takes the Law of the People′s Republic of China on National Parks as its normative basis and public participation theory as its analytical framework. Employing normative analysis, literature analysis, and supplementary open-source materials, it examines the theoretical logic, legal norms, and practical patterns of public participation in national parks across four dimensions: participation subjects, participation levels, participation effectiveness, and participation boundaries. The findings reveal that public participation in China′s national parks has developed diverse forms, including opinion expression, consultative decision-making, community co-management, ecological stewardship, nature education, volunteer services, and oversight and feedback. It indicates that an institutional foundation for public participation has begun to take shape. However, structural disjunctions remain among theoretical understanding, legal norms, and institutional practice. First, the effectiveness of public feedback remains insufficient. Although the law stipulates mechanisms for opinion solicitation, communication and consultation, and social oversight, the procedural system for collecting, responding to, adopting, and evaluating public input is still underdeveloped. Second, the subjectivity of local communities as principal actors needs to be strengthened. Communities are closely linked to resource use, livelihood transformation, ecological compensation, and ecological product supply. In processes such as rule-making, benefit negotiation, and effectiveness assessment, they are often treated as recipients of management and assistance rather than as equal participants. Third, the overall level of public participation is relatively low. Participatory activities largely concentrate on information disclosure, consultation forums, volunteer initiatives, patrol assistance, nature education, and ecological experiences. Substantive involvement in planning, major decision-making, concession operations, and governance evaluation remains fairly limited. Fourth, benefit-sharing mechanisms are not yet robust. Ecological compensation, concession operation, ecological product income, and income disclosure have not yet formed a stable incentive structure. Fifth, the boundaries of participation are ambiguously defined, a condition that can easily give rise to two problems: either insufficient public engagement, or the disorderly expression of demands and excessive resource exploitation under the guise of participation. To shift public participation from formalistic involvement toward substantive collaborative governance, this paper proposes four institutional improvement pathways: embedding democratic consultation mechanisms to construct a closed-loop process of opinion submission, acceptance, handling, feedback, and supervision; optimizing benefit-sharing mechanisms by implementing differentiated ecological compensation, prioritizing community participation in concession operations, facilitating the value transformation of ecological products, and enhancing revenue transparency; strengthening community organizational platforms to boost organized participation capacity; and establishing a tiered participation mechanism that clarifies participation boundaries according to participant types, issue categories, spatial scope, and ecological risks. Furthermore, it is advisable to implement differentiated institutional arrangements under the principle of "one park, one policy", tailoring measures to local conditions in light of each national park′s ecosystem type, conservation objectives, community composition, and governance pressures. This study can offer institutional references for refining the in-depth public participation system and elevating national park governance under the implementation of the Law of the People′s Republic of China on National Parks.