Abstract: The paper systematically review the state of art of roof disasters in coal mining faces in China, mainly focusing on strata control theory, monitoring and early warning technology and equipment, mine pressure laws and data analysis, and control measures. To date, the roof disaster of themining face is still an important factor restricting the safe production of coal mines in China. In the past two years, both the number of roof disasters and the number of casualties have shown an obvious upward trend, and the prevention and control of roof disasters is still severe. In the field of basic theoretical research on mining pressure, researchers have successively proposed mechanical structural models in China, such as "masonry beam", "transferring rock beam", "combined suspended beam-hinged rock beam", "cutting block", and "zoning support theory ", clarifying the disaster mechanism of roof disasters under different rock strata conditions; In the aspect of roof disaster monitoring and early warning, China's coal mines have begun to get rid of the traditional single near-field mine pressure monitoring. Instead, the real-time monitoring, dynamic perception and cooperative early warning of the near and far field roof states of the working face have gradually developed. This improvement helps to establish the mine pressure monitoring system to monitor the working resistance of the support, roof subsidence, coal stress in the near field, and the microseismic monitoring system to monitor the fracture location and energy of the roof of the overlying strata in the far field. In the aspects of mine pressure law and data analysis, the mine pressure law of mining face under different surrounding rock conditions of shallow buried depth, hard roof and non-hard roof is summarized, and the increasing characteristics of working resistance of support under various conditions are clarified. In roof disaster prevention and control, the corresponding roof disaster prevention technology is formed according to the roof disaster types. For the hard roof mine with strong mine pressure and high probability to roof disaster, roof deep-hole blasting, shallow-hole hydraulic fracturing, underground directional area hydraulic fracturing, surface hydraulic fracturing and other technologies are implemented to effectively prevent the occurrence of roof disasters. Generally speaking, the theory and technical system of roof disaster prevention and control of mining face in China is still being improved. With the continuous development of the new technology and the construction of intelligent mine, the intelligent early warning and joint prevention and control of roof disaster will foster great development.