Forest Change and Population Redistribution Reshaped China’s Human–Forest Nexus over Three Decades: Contrasting Natural and Planted Forests

China has experienced extensive forest expansion alongside rapid urbanization and large-scale population redistribution over the past three decades, yet how these transformations have reshaped the spatial relationship between people and different forest types remains unclear. Here, we quantified changes in forest–population relationships across China from 1990 to 2020 using forest area per person (FAP), forest-proximate people (FPP), and the forest–human nexus (FHN), for all forests combined and for natural and planted forests separately. Although total forest area increased by 9.3%, population growth resulted in an 11.5% decline in FAP. The share of the population living within 5 km of any forest increased from 57.4% to 62.4%, but divergent trajectories emerged between forest types: proximity to natural forest declined from 56.2% to 51.3%, whereas proximity to planted forest increased from 30.5% to 47.5%. FHN for all forests increased by 26.2% and planted-forest FHN by 59.5%, while natural-forest FHN remained broadly stable (−1.9%). Shapley decomposition further revealed substantial spatial heterogeneity in the contributions of forest change and population redistribution, with forest change contributing most to increases in FHN for all forests and planted forests at the national scale, while the two processes acted in opposing directions for natural forests. These findings provide a more complete, population-explicit perspective on China’s evolving human–forest relationship and offer a spatial basis for sustainable forest management, conservation, restoration, and land-use planning.