Evidence abounds that attitude of local stakeholders towards the protected area influences community participation to conservation, thus affects the achievement of conservation targets, as tested in the "perception-attitude-participation" hypothesis. Perception provides an important means of assessing the people-park relations which reflects the performance of the on-going China national park building. Exploring perceptions in different facets of national park establishment and management can help identify aspects of current progresses in the national park pilot that are promising for improvement of management efficiency and those that need innovation. Taking Wuyishan as a case, this study identifies and analyses perception of, attitude to, and community participation into the national park pilot of local residents to analyse the mechanism affecting participation based on the "perception-attitude-participation" hypothesis, and to help facilitate local communities into national park construction and management. The basic hypothesis is that participation as a behaviour is directed by the positive or negative attitude towards national park, which is formed by a judgement of combination of perceptions to different aspects. Contrary to similar studies, the study is carried out on the case of the park in establishment, where the attitudes of local stakeholders have a chance to influence the process of the national park establishment. The qualitative method of the grounded theory is used to inductively identify key concepts concerning perception, attitude and participation, and develop a community participation theory from in-depth, semi-structured, and open-ended interviews with local stakeholders. The open coding identified 45 concepts and 13 categories, and paradigm analysis revealed six categories which testify the perception-attitude-participation hypothesis, those including stabilising resource use right, facilitating community participation in decision-making, ensuring development right, innovating industrial modes, improving individual adaptability and reducing policy risks. The finally induced mechanism of community participation in the national park establishment and management is reasoned by the autonomy, innovation and adaptability of natural resource management. A more comprehensive description of the reasons and the background of their formation is provided that community participation is a dynamic process of improving autonomy, during which the livelihood resource endowment should be guaranteed to achieve long-term valorisation, and is finally assimilated to a part of social-ecological system adaptive governance. Based on the theoretical explanation, the article put forwards ways of improving community perception and promoting participation. Finally, this theory can be further extracted to quantitative indicators to evaluate community participation progress in tracking the national park establishment and operation.