The liberation and re?separation of coking middlings is an important approach to promote the clean and efficient development and utilization of coal resources. Taking the middlings from a coal preparation plant in Shanxi as the test object, comparative tests of three crushing and liberation methods (impact, compression and shear), comparative grinding tests (full?size grinding vs. classified grinding), and flotation tests were systematically carried out to investigate the effects of crushing mode, grinding method and flotation flowsheet on the separation performance of the middlings. The results show that compression crushing can achieve selective liberation of the middlings. By adopting classified grinding combined with a one?stage roughing and one?stage cleaning flotation process, a clean coal product with a yield of 21.95% and an ash content of 12.70% can be obtained (the ash content can be reduced to below 12.50% after parameter opti-mization). Finally, a combined quality?improving process consisting of compression crushing, classification at 0.5 mm, classified grinding, and one?roughing one?cleaning flotation is established, which can provide a technical reference for the resource recovery of similar high?ash coking middlings.