Abstract: Lake eutrophication is becoming increasingly severe worldwide, not only affecting sustainable development of water resources, leading to degraded ecosystem functions, but also threatening socio-economic development and ecological security. This paper provides a systematic review of basic theories and the latest research progress on lake ecosystem restoration, including regime shift, nutrient control, biological manipulation and environmental criteria. It also outlines the restoration approaches of internal and external nutrient loads reduction, biological measures and water conservancy measures based on domestic and international restoration practices. Lake restoration is a long-term and arduous task, to address the current unresolved issues and the new changing environment, research prospects of setting restoration goals, determining nutrient loads thresholds, quantifying aquatic communities relations, and building watershed management and control system are proposed in order to provide scientific support for lake restoration.