Quantifying the potentials of forest carbon sequestration can scientifically help evaluate the maximum carbon sequestration capacity and design sustainable forest management strategies for achieving its potentials in mitigating climate change impacts. At present, there have been no commonly-accepted concepts and associated quantification methods for defining forest carbon sequestration potentials. In this paper, we first provided a brief literature review on the concepts of carbon sequestration potentials, and then introduced our new concept for defining carbon sequestration potentials in the context of sustainable management of plantation forests. Chinese fir plantation was used as an example to illustrate the proposed concept as well as the way of quantifying forest carbon sequestration potentials by applying the forest ecosystem model FORECAST.