China is one of the few countries seriously affected by storm surge. Although great progress has been made in the past few decades in the study of the forming of storm surge disaster, the current achievement of storm surge vulnerability and risk assessment cannot meet the demand of the storm surge risk management. In this paper, the latest progress of storm surge hazard, vulnerability, comprehensive risk assessment and its application are systematically reviewed, specially focusing on the computing of typical return period storm surge and probable maximum storm surge, its physical and social vulnerability, the application of storm surge risk assessment and its deficiencies. Based on this, this paper gives a future prospective of the urgent problems and future research emphasis in storm surge risk assessment. The future work should focus on the storm surge disaster model building, systematic and quantitative research of storm surge disaster. When   the future risk assessment is considered, the climate change and the sea-level rise should also be taken into account. The quantitative assessment of vulnerability of typical coastal exposure affected by the storm surge is still a big challenge of comprehensive storm surge risk assessment.