As one of the world′s most important biomes, tropical forests harbor a rich array of plant and animal species and offer a wealth of goods and services to human society. Meanwhile, they have also been experiencing unprecedented severity of natural and human disturbance and suffering from ongoing deforestation. The destruction of tropical forests has imposed serious threat to the sustainable socio-economic development of the human society, such that how to effectively restore the degraded tropical forests has become one of the most urgent issues in the current biodiversity conservation. Land-use history interacts with natural forces to influence the severity of disturbance events and the rate and mode of recovery processes in tropical forests. The catastrophic natural disturbances, such as hurricane, fire, volcano, and flood, usually impact the tropical forests severely, but with very long return intervals. The main causes of tropical deforestation are several types of anthropogenic disturbances, such as logging, shifting cultivation, agricultural land exploitation, etc. The recovery process and rate of the anthropogenically-disturbed vegetation are obviously different from that of the naturally-disturbed vegetation. Compared with the community composition, the restoration rate of community structure is relative faster. Among the factors which relate to this pervasive change of tropical forests, those that influence the rate or even direction of ecological restoration include multiple disturbances and their interactions, inhabitation or competition of herbs and invasive species, the actual vegetation and soil conditions, residual vegetation components, landscape matrix around the degraded vegetation, and global climate change. In order to improve our understanding of vegetation restoration in tropical forests, the following were needed to be conduct further. The long-term data from established permanent plots can be used to generate hypotheses as objectives of short-term studies and allow analysis of vegetation responses to climate variation in the face of the ongoing global change. Apart from plants, other biota should also be studied during the secondary succession of vegetation. Because of expanding plantation in tropical regions, how to conserve biodiversity and restore ecological functioning in such artificially-constructed ecosystems will be a new topic in the future vegetation ecology studies. Our ability of predicting the direction of vegetation recovery on disturbed lands will be greatly improved when coupling with landscape is considered. The key point of ecological restoration is how to restore the ecological functioning of biodiversity. So studies based on functional groups could help us to better understand the ecological restoration process of the extremely high diversity tropical forest vegetations.