Natural enemies are a very important element of agricultural ecosystems. Utilisation of natural enemies is a safe and effective approach to the control of insect pests and is also the future trend in pest management. We here summarize progress in research on natural enemies and their sustainable use in China as well as around the world. We point out that we should take the initiative to promote natural control in pest management programs, develop novel approaches such as the “webbased coordinated control approach” in which several pests will be simultaneously suppressed by the collective actions of several natural enemies, and finally establish selfsustaining agricultural ecosystems in which natural enemies are a fully functional part and populations of insect pests are kept at a very low level. In the future we should focus our studies in two key areas: the behavioural, physiological and molecular mechanisms of parasitism and predation by natural enemies, and how to assist natural enemies to suppress insect pests in intensive agricultural ecosystems. The following five research areas require particular attention at the different levels of gene, individual, population, community and ecosystem: (1) parasitism and predation behaviour of natural enemies and their adaptation to their host/prey, (2) the nutrient and reproductive physiological basis for the mass rearing of natural enemies, (3) the mechanism of immunointeraction between parasitoids and their hosts, (4) the ecological mechanism of pest control through the collective use of natural enemies, and (5) novel models for the biological control of pests focusing on sustainable utilization of natural enemies.