Hot stamping steels (HSSs) have been widely used in automobiles, to reduce weight and improve safety due to their ultrahigh strength and ease of synthesis at high temperatures. At present, steel sheets with high strength and good ductility are needed to further reduce the weight of manufactured products. The most popular HSS grade in use at present is 22MnB5, which has an ultimate tensile strength (UTS) of 1500 MPa, but it has a ductility of less than 7%, which is quite poor. Driven by the demand for weight reduction in the automotive industries, a 2000 MPa HSS have been developed by employing a new alloying design and an ultrafast heating process. The latter has received much less attention than the former, although it demonstrates huge potential for improving mechanical properties and production efficiency of HSSs. In this study, the effect of heating processes, including conventional and flash heating, at a ramp of 150^oC/s in the temperature range of 850-950^oC before tempering at 150^oC on the microstructures and mechanical properties of a new type of 2000 MPa HSS were studied. Compared with the conventional heating at a relatively low ramp rate, the flash heating improved the strength and ductility of 2000 MPa HSS, simultaneously. Moreover, their best tensile properties were achieved after flash heating to 950^oC: UTS was 2180 MPa and total elongation was 13%, which were approximately 200 MPa and 4% higher than those obtained using conventional heating, respectively. This is because flash heating results in the formation of a more refined hierarchical martensite structure after quenching, with a higher dislocation density and a larger fraction of retained austenite (RA). RA was formed by dissolving cementite particles containing high C/Mn concentrations, which were then inherited in the formed austenite after quenching due to insufficient time for the homogenization of solute C/Mn by diffusion during the flash heating. The volume fraction of RA increased gradually with an increase in the flash heating temperature, then, more cementite particles were dissolved. This was also confirmed by kinetic simulations that reversed the austenitization on the dissolving cementite. Finally, it was proposed that flash heating technology is a promising technology for the production of ultra-strong and ductile HSS sheets.