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Corporate governance and firm performance in Chinese family firmsIntroduction Motivations Family ownership is universal among privately held firms, but is also dominate among publicly traded firms in the world. In Western Europe, South and East Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa, family firms are at least as common in public firms as widely held and other nonfamily firms (Claessens et al. 2000; Faccio Lang 2002; La Porta et al. 1999). Even in the United States and United Kingdom, some of the largest listed firms, such as Wal-Mart Stores and Ford Motor, are family controlled (Burkart et al. 2003). (why your research is important)The prevalent presence of family firms has led to a surge in the academic research on the family firms from the perspective of corporate governance and finance, one of which is to address the twin problems of the classic owner-manager conflict, and a conflict between large (family) and small (nonfamily) shareholders. This results in the research on the effect of family-controlled governance on the firm performance, but fails to reach a unanimous conclusion. Some scholars produce evidence that family firms outperform nonfamily firms (Anderson Reeb 2003; Maury 2006; McConaughy et al. 1998; Sraer Thesmar 2007; Villalonga Amit 2006), while others find the opposite or mixed (Claessens et al. 2002; Faccio et al. 2001; Lins 2003; Miller et al. 2007; Morck et al. 2000). In emerging economies, however, the prevalence of concentrated ownership and an absence of effective external governance mechanisms make the agency problems more costly and problematic (Wright et al. 2005). Thus, whether family firms are more or less valuable than nonfamily firms in these countries still remains an open question and deserves better understanding.(deserves to be further studied)Research questions (specific and testable)How does the internal corporate governance, such as family ownership, control, or management, influence the firm value of Chinese fami