Coal-Water Slurry(CWS）gasification and combustion technology is an important part of clean coal technology. High quality CWS has great environmental and economic value for realizing the clean and efficient utilization of coal. The CSW dispersant is one of the main factors affecting the CWS quality. The development of new and efficient CWS dispersant has always been a research hotspot. The conventional dispersants such as lignin based and humic acid sulfonate dispersants have obvious cost advantages with poor stability and high apparent viscosity,which is not suitable for long-time storage or long-distance transportation. Meanwhile,the dispersants such as naphthalene and poly carboxylic acid based are superior to the first two in viscosity reduce of CWS with a high cost. The combination method that mixes the above dispersants together at a certain proportion is effective to make up the shortage caused by one dispersant. However,the attempt to improve the performance of dispersant by chemical modification is uninterrupted,such as adding hydrophilic functional groups as carboxyl,hydroxyl and sulfonic groups and grafting different side chain structure to the main structure of dispersant. In this paper,these achievements were reviewed.  The analysis shows that lignin and naphthalene based dispersants are dominated in the CWS market,but the modification of poly carboxylic and nonionic dispersants with low cost modifier is the focus of future research and development,which is expected to achieve a breakthrough in high-performance and low-cost dispersants. In addition,the use of natural products and its waste to prepare CWS dispersants is also a competitive direction in the view of environmental protection and circular economy.