This article examines how China's Giant Panda National Park turns conservation boundaries into a redistribution of collective forest rights without expropriation. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, and legal-policy analysis, the study traces how the park's boundary is ‘made real’ through territorial technologies: maps and markers, permitting and certification gateways, and remote-sensing-enabled audits. Two cases illustrate a dual mechanism of taking-like loss: (a) a de facto logging ban produced through permit withdrawal and routine refusal, blocking timber income and lawful conversion into emerging forest commodities, and (b) a certification freeze that prevents in-park forest rights from being documented and used as collateral, immobilising credit-dependent livelihoods and investment. Across both, an ‘audit horizon’ reshapes bureaucratic risk, making non-authorisation the safest default. Linking legal geography and takings analysis, it explains why substitutes, leasing, swaps, agreements, and welfare-forest conversion remain distributively thin, and it proposes clearer compensation triggers and calibrated, accountable permitting.
Fan Li (2026) studied this question.