Mangroves are the unique intertidal plant formations growing in sheltered tropical and subtropical coastal areas. Due to increasing population and economic development, they had been severely damaged in the last several decades, facing degradation and loss. In recent years, many measures were undertaken to rehabilitate mangroves in different countries. However, followed by anthropologic disturbance and natural disasters, the lacking of technical support for afforestation, lower survival rate of afforestation, and careless managementled to slow enhancementof mangrove area. Then lower survival rate was the primary threshold to mangrove restoration. The recent advances of mangrove restoration within four processes were reviewed, namely: (1) site-species matching, which includes temperature, substrates and hydrological factors of afforestation sites; (2) selection and introduction of mangrove species, that includes status of native species’selection and exotic ones’introduction; (3) applicationof silviculture techniques, including planting, seedling and sapling nursing techniques, and afforestation cost’s comparison; and (4) post-cultivated management and monitoring, including the saplings’ watching, diseases and pests’prevention and resistance, and ecological monitoring. Coupled with the field surveys’results, some basic principles and appliedcases were generalized. Finally, based on the current status of mangrove restoration in China, there is a discussion on the future emphasis of mangrove restoration researches, which is (1) undertaking mangrove rehabilitation in the abandonedaquaculture ponds; (2) monitoring on the restoration of biodiversity in the mangrove ecosystem; (3) researching on allelopathy in mangrove ecosystem more elaborately; (4) afforesting mixed stands with different mangrove species; and at last but not the least (5) implementing ecological restoration of mangrove wetlands.