The small molecular phase, which strongly affects coal's reactivity, is the main part of the structure unit in coal. At present, its composition and structure features have not been clearly understood. In this paper, a flash pyrolysis technique with on-line GC (PGC) was used to investigate the properties of the small molecular phase from six kinds of rank coal in China. Experiments were divided into two parts: one is PGC of parent coal; another is PGC of coal extracts from NMP + CS2 (75: 1) solvent extraction at 373 K. Results show that the small molecular phase mainly consists of C-12-C-16 compounds that could be integrally released when the heating rate was greater than 10 K/ms and the final pyrolysis temperature was 1373 K; other compounds may be the products of decomposition and polymerization from this small molecular phase during pyrolysis.