Abstract: Coal is the main source of energy in China and the most important driver of our development for a long time. It is predicted that coal is going to be the main energy source for our social and economic development in the future. However, the long-term coal mining activities in China have caused serious damage to the ecological environment and comprehensive ecological restoration is urgently needed. At present, most coal mine ecological restoration is limited within a small scale in China, such as one or several mine areas, lacking of ecological restoration planning at the national spatial level, and corresponding ecological restoration strategies. The ecological restoration of coal mines is a national systematic ecological project that should be carried out with the concept of “restoring nature by the power of nature”, on the basis of local ecological sensitivity issues, with the purpose of stopping the destruction of natural ecosystems and continuing to provide ecosystem services, and with the starting point of improving the quality of the human environment in mining areas. The development of strategies for coal mine ecological restoration is based on the following four aspects: First, potential vegetation types are selected based on China’s vegetation zoning and according to local ambient conditions; Second, Normalized Integrated Ecological Sensitivity is calculated to characterize the urgency of ecological restoration coal mine and then spatial auto-correlation analysis is used to determine the aggregation relationship and pattern of coal mines with different NIES. Third, a buffer zone analysis is conducted on coal mines and population to obtain the population benefiting from the ecological restoration. Based on the above results, the corresponding ecological restoration strategies were developed according to the areas of coal mines in China.