Abstract: Data about the economic investment in nature reserves were collected by means of questionnaire and consultation with leading officials of the nature reserves and retrieval from literature in 2013 for analysis of status quo of and problems in funding of the nature reserves, concerning channel, scale, level and use. Results show that the nation invested a total of 18388 million yuan RMB into the 1262 national/provincial nature reserves or on average 14.5706 million yuan RMB per reserve or 13801.42 yuan RMB per unit area(km^-2). The funds invested into the nature reserves increased by 2.99 times from 1999 to 2009, and by 2.45 times from 2009 to 2013. Comparison shows that the total fund China put into the nature reserve was a bit lower than that the US government put into the national parks. However, the funding of an individual national nature reserve amounted only to 74.8% of that of an American national park, and only 27.0% in terms of funding per unit area. The funds of the nature reserves were controlled by different administration departments, who did not have any integrated budgeting of their incoming funds and revenue, which added to irrational restriction of expenditure and led to shortage and structural deficiency of funds for the nature reserves as a whole.