Legal Research On Recovery Of China’s Illegally-exported Cultural Relics

China takes the possession of countless cultural relics, which certainly makes us feel proud, but it’s also one of the countries with most relics illegally exported, which really saddens us. Actually, since the founding of New China, it has never given up pursuing those relics. However, due to the economic development and the weak comprehensive national strength, there were not so many achievements in this job. With the reform and opening up, Chinese people began paying more attention to those relics. Especially, several public auctions of bronze animal heads of Yuanmingyuan have stirred the hot discussion of when and how those cultural relics can return to China.On the basis of researches into those relics of China, this thesis firstly analyzes three major ways of the recovery of illegally-exported cultural relics:purchase, donation and recourse. Moreover, several cases are brought in for analyzing the disadvantages of applying the first two ways and the way of recourse is encouraged to be more applied in this job; Then, the thesis focuses on the obstacles in the process of pursuing the illegally-exported cultural relics and three main reasons are concluded as follows:firstly, there exist two totally different law theories about protecting the cultural relics, which results in the countries for importing cultural relics refuses to return these illegal cultural relics; secondly, the current international treaties all have deadly shortcomings, which certainly affects their effectiveness and especially fails to solve the problem of returning those cultural relics looted during wartimes; thirdly, different countries have various regulations about the bona fide acquisition system and the subject of lawsuit, which will increase the difficulty of pursuing the illegally-exported cultural relics; finally, this thesis analyzes four successful cases of recovering those cultural relics and draws the conclusion that China should perfect its domestic laws related to the pursuit of illegally-exported cultural relics and develop the important roles Chinese people and great leaders play in this job so that more cultural relics can be regained.