Tigers Roar Back in China’s Northeast Forest Park

Wild Amur (Siberian) tigers and Amur leopards are reclaiming their historic range in northeastern China, capping more than a decade of habitat restoration, anti-poaching enforcement and community co-management, according to People’s Daily. The populations of both endangered big cats have grown steadily, turning a once-silent stretch of the China-Russia border into one of the world’s most closely watched large-predator recovery stories.

The Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park, spanning roughly 14,000 square kilometers across the Jilin-Heilongjiang provincial border, now reports forest coverage of 97.74 percent. Wild Amur tigers rose from a 2015 baseline of 27 to more than 70, and Amur leopards grew from 42 to over 110, per the official figures released around the park’s fifth anniversary.

A Slow, Deliberate Reversal

The comeback did not happen overnight. The Amur tiger and Amur leopard — both class-one nationally protected species in China and global flagships for biodiversity — had been pushed to the brink by decades of logging, habitat loss and poaching, with populations hitting a low around the year 2000.

The reversal followed a sequence of policy decisions. Jilin Province banned the hunting of terrestrial wildlife in 1996; national-level nature reserves such as Hunchun and Wangqing were established in the early 2000s; and in 2015 the province halted all commercial logging in key state-owned forests. The park itself was formally established in October 2021, uniting scattered reserves under a single management framework. The Guangming Net reported that this approach built China’s first full-coverage “sky-earth-air” integrated monitoring system, using a 700-megahertz wireless band alongside infrared cameras, drones and satellite remote sensing.

Technology Meets ‘Iron Footsteps’

The park’s monitoring network is a signature innovation. Nearly 30,000 infrared cameras operate day and night, complemented by remote-sensing satellites and drones, enabling real-time detection of wildlife, prey species and illegal activity. Feng Limin, director of the Northeast Tiger and Leopard Monitoring and Research Center and a professor at Beijing Normal University, recalled the change in a People’s Daily feature: cameras 20 years ago required climbing the mountain to change batteries and retrieve film, while solar power and real-time transmission now allow most areas to be monitored around the clock.

That technology is backed by thousands of people on the ground. As of the 2026 spring fire season, Jilin deployed 560 watchtowers, 1,755 checkpoints and 1,854 video monitors on round-the-clock duty, with more than 15,000 rangers, watchmen and inspectors and 447 firefighting teams totaling over 9,500 personnel. Many of these guardians are former hunters who gave up their guns for patrol uniforms; one retired hunter, Guo Naiwen, took up beekeeping.

Rebuilding the Food Chain

A key part of the strategy has been restoring prey species. Since 2022, the Taipinggou National Nature Reserve, working with Northeast Forestry University, has rewilded 68 sika deer across five batches. The deer now range across more than 80 percent of the reserve, and Amur tigers have begun to settle there. Yang Feifei, a PhD student at the university, estimated the tiger population in the Taipinggou area at roughly 15 to 17, CCTV News reported.

That prey recovery has helped push the tiger’s footprint far beyond the park’s core. Jiang Guangshun, a professor at Northeast Forestry University who has monitored the species for 25 years, said that in 1999 there was only sporadic tiger presence along the China-Russia border, but by 2025 tigers had appeared in Laoyeling, Zhangguangcailing, Wandashan, the Xiaoxing’anling and even the Daxing’anling, with habitat now exceeding 70,000 square kilometers.

Cross-Border Cooperation

Because Amur tigers and leopards roam freely across the China-Russia border, conservation is inherently international. Since 2025, the two countries have conducted a joint identification survey, finding at least 147 wild Amur tigers — 72 in the Chinese park, 96 in Russia’s Land of the Leopard, with 21 shared across the border — and at least 223 Amur leopards, with 115 in the Chinese park, 135 in Russia’s and 27 shared. China Daily reported the findings, which were released to mark the 16th Global Tiger Day on July 29.

The same report highlighted China’s first recorded “six tigers in one frame” — a family image first captured in 2025 and repeated in February 2026, when cameras filmed five cubs nicknamed the “Wu Xiao Fu,” or Five Little Fortunes. Zhou Fei, deputy secretary-general of WWF’s Beijing office, said the record is a microcosm of China’s conservation achievements and offers hope for global endangered-species recovery. WWF’s global Tiger Alive Initiative chief, Stuart Chapman, emphasized that protecting the communities living alongside the cats is essential to sustaining progress.

Community at the Center

Conservation has also required managing the friction between growing wildlife populations and the people who live among them. Villagers report wild boars raiding crops and, in some cases, leopards preying on domestic dogs. In response, authorities have pursued a “protection by all the people” model. Duan Zhaogang, director of the park’s management bureau, said that joint participation by local governments and social forces has made conservation results more remarkable.

WWF has supported this with human-wildlife conflict programs in Hunchun, ecological buffer zones in Dongning, conservation-friendly farming in Wangqing and tiger-friendly forest restoration in Huangnihe. The park also opened a new education center in Dongning — China’s first themed around animals’ sensory perspective — to build public engagement.

What to Watch

The recovery is significant not only for China but for global efforts to halt biodiversity loss. Over the past century, wild tiger habitat worldwide shrank by roughly 90 percent, and habitat fragmentation and human-wildlife conflict remain persistent threats.

Yet the Northeast park has shown that large predators can return when habitat, prey, enforcement and community interests are addressed together. Looking ahead, the priorities are sustaining prey populations, expanding cross-border cooperation with Russia, and keeping human-wildlife conflict management in step with growing tiger and leopard numbers. For a region where tigers had nearly vanished, the sound of their return now carries well beyond the forest.