With investigation in the twenty-seven provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities across the mainland of China, this study aims at learning about the situation of ecotourism development in different types of protected areas including nature reserves, natural scenic areas, forest parks, wetland parks, water parks, and geological parks, and providing some theoretical basis for ecotourism policy making and resources and environment protection. Investigation results show that ecotourism has been developed widely in most protected areas in China. The characteristics of present situation are as follows: (1) Chinese ecotourism market including the number of visitors and tourism revenue has reached a certain scale, and tourism activities are becoming more diversified, especially with some ecotourism special activities springing up. (2) Environment interpretation has gained much attention in most protected areas who covered almost all kinds of interpretation ways, did environment interpretation system planning, combined local culture and nature with it, but the content are not professionally enough, even with some obvious errors. (3) The infrastructure construction has been completed in general according to the survey, however, ecological compatibility is the important issue most protected areas has been ignored. A variety of protected areas we investigated are inclined to construct infrastructure in a way of mass tourism. (4) Although the environment situation is good in wide scope, the ecotourism environment protection measures are used little which will cause a fatal result to the natural environment, so that the environment management system are need be organized in a term as short as we can. (5) The garbage was thought as the most serious pollution in more than half of the respondent scenic spots. Besides, air pollution and natural attraction damage has existed in more than 20% respondent scenic spots. Ecotourism monitoring and supervision are very necessary for scenic spots manager to control these pollution phenomena. However, we found the environment monitoring system and impact assessment for construction projects has been rarely mentioned in the planning or the policy rather than the implement. (6) We are glad to see that residents in local community have gained considerable benefits from participation in ecotourism, which results in the positive attitudes of 95 percent residents to ecotourism development and is helpful to it. But the community participation in some extent is still at a lower-level stage. More residents participate in ecotourism in some ways, such as selling ecotourism commodity, working for the protected areas, offering guide service, but excluding decision making. (7) As to the tourism supervision in protected areas, corresponding regulation has generally formulated while some special rules such as contingency plan, fire prevention organization and security supervision need to be put forward in the future. And the quantity and quality of employees, together with ecotourism guides specialization, cannot meet the demand of ecotourism development. (8) At the same time, lacking of funds, as well as inefficient management system, is the prominent and general barrier to ecotourism development in China. Although there are many problems we, stakeholders, must focus on and solve, China still has a tremendous potential in ecotourism because of the abundant natural resources, a huge market, and more and more attention from all kinds of stakeholders.