This study mainly introduces the development of the Flexible Global Ocean-Atmosphere-Land System Model： Grid-point Version 2 （FGOALS-g2） and the preliminary evaluations of its performances based on re- sults from the pre-industrial control run and four members of historical runs according to the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project （CMIP5） experiment design. The results suggest that many obvi- ous improvements have been achieved by the FGOALS-g2 compared with the previous version, FGOALS-gl, including its climatological mean states, climate variability, and 20th century surface temperature evolution. For example, FGOALS-g2 better simulates the frequency of tropical land precipitation, East Asian Monsoon precipitation and its seasonal cycle, MJO and ENSO, which are closely related to the updated cumulus parameterization scheme, as well as the alleviation of uncertainties in some key parameters in shallow and deep convection schemes, cloud fraction, cloud macro/microphysical processes and the boundary layer scheme in its atmospheric model. The annual cycle of sea surface temperature along the equator in the Pacific is significantly improved in the new version. The sea ice salinity simulation is one of the unique characteristics of FGOALS-g2, although it is somehow inconsistent with empirical observations in the Antarctic.