Since the last few years, corporate governance emerged as a highly important research topic in China. The major objective of this paper is to empirically pinpoint the impact of corporate governance on the performance of Chinese listed firms using different variables. To narrowing down the topic, we included board structure variables to evaluate the firm performance. We have investigated the data of Chinese companies listed on Shanghai stock exchange and Shenzhen stock exchange from 2008 to 2011. There are 6981 observations used for regression and spearman correlation coefficient analysis. The variables used in this research paper to measure firm performance included return on equity, return on invested capital and Tobin's Q while corporate governance variables were board size and board independence. In a broader perspective, empirical results clearly indicate that the board size has significant negative effects on firm performance. On the other hand, the board independence has overall significant positive effects on firm performance. These findings bear board implications in corporate governance, and thus could be helpful in improving the governance, performance and productivity of the firms to comply with the challenges posed by competing firms in the end.