At present, flash drought occurs globally and regionally and causes a lot of socio-economic loss in a very short time. Therefore, flash drought has been regarded as one of the hottest issues in drought research. However, flash drought monitoring, prediction and decision-making have encountered a lot of challenges due to its multiple driven factors and complex spatio-temporal process. Aiming at this problem, this paper focused on the agricultural land in China, and analyzed the spatio-temporal distribution of three kinds of flash droughts (i.e., precipitation-deficit, high-temperature, and composite flash droughts) from 1983 to 2015. We studied the occurrences, duration, spatial distribution, temporal distribution, and trend of all three kinds of flash droughts. Our results demonstrated that, the occurrences of flash drought agricultural land in China increased year by year, among which high-temperature flash drought increased dramatically; duration of flash droughts had different trends, but the variations were relatively smooth; Northeast China was identified as a vulnerable area of flash drought, indicating more flash drought events and longer duration; flash droughts in China were found to concentrate in spring (high-temperature drought) and summer seasons (precipitation-deficit drought). This study is helpful for building new flash drought monitoring method and system, and it is also valuable for flash drought preparedness on regional scale.