In response to the global change crisis, China has proposed the comprehensive construction of a protected area system with national parks as the main body. This study systematically collected and organized several publicly available protected area vector data, including world protected area data and regional data of the Arctic, North America, Australia, and China; screened national parks defined by the IUCN; and analyzed the spatiotemporal dynamic patterns of national parks around the world to reveal the development trends of national parks in each continent, to provide useful references for the construction of national parks and the spatial planning of protected areas in China. The results showed that, with the 1970s as the boundary, the development of global national parks can be divided into a development period and a cooperation period. During the development period, the concept of national parks was transmitted from the United States to various countries around the world and developed into unique spatial patterns according to the situation of each country. For example, national parks in the Americas and Oceania were relatively concentrated, while national parks in Asia, Europe, and Africa were relatively scattered. During the cooperation period, due to the increasing awareness of environmental protection in various countries and the joint efforts of global organizations such as IUCN, the growth of national parks has accelerated, with nearly half of them distributed in biodiversity hotspots. Based on policies such as the “Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework” and the construction of China's nature reserve system, this study proposes to incorporate a oversea "co-management system" into the management of national parks in China. It also suggests that in the future, national parks should be extended in the southern region of Guangxi, which is in the India and Myanmar global biodiversity hotspot, to fully leveraged the multiple ecological service functions of national parks, such as public welfare and sharing.