Rewilding is an emerging new approach for ecological protection and restoration, and refers to the increase in wildness in specific landscapes, with particular emphasis on improving ecosystem resilience and maintaining biodiversity. The core elements of rewilding projects can include protecting core wilderness areas, enhancing connectivity of wilderness areas, conserving and reintroducing keystone species (including large carnivores), allowing natural disturbances, reducing human intervention and management, and removing artificial infrastructure. This paper introduces the rewilding practices in North America and Europe, and through comparison, posits several new ideas for China's ecological protection and restoration projects of mountains-rivers-forests-farmlands-lakes-grasslands based around the rewilding concept. These ideas include five strategic changes, including:conversion from reductionist thinking to systematic thinking, promotion of protection and natural restoration over engineering remediation, from project-scale to landscape-scale, from short-term pilot to long-term practice, and from government-led to multi-participation projects. Additionally, five actionable recommendations are proposed, including conducting basic investigation of wilderness and rewilding, protecting remaining high-value wilderness areas, exploring the rewilding approaches used in different regions, establishing large-scale landscape conservation networks with wilderness and rewilded areas as the core, and to promote ecological experiences and nature education activities based on rewilding.