From the perspectives of listing regulation and government control, this paper describes the motivation of controlling rights transfer in Chinese listed companies in aspects of acquirer selection, transfer pricing, performance after the transfer and so on in the process of controlling rights transfer. Using 1410 controlling rights transfer events in China's A-share market by the end of 2013 as the sample, it arrives at the conclusions as follows: firstly, governments tend to transfer state-owned listed companies in non-monopoly industries or with poor performance and retain the companies in monopoly industries and with sound performance; secondly, in economically backward areas, governments are prone to transfer controlling rights to powerful nonnative acquirers to attract investment; thirdly, private acquirers with political connections acquire companies with better profitability, but do not pay higher premiums; fourthly, after controlling rights transfer, corporate performance does not raise as a whole, and although correlative M & A and stronger strength of acquirers lead to the increase in corporate performance, such samples are less than 40%. Therefore, controlling rights transfer in Chinese listed companies is not overall efficiency-oriented, and if controlling rights transfer is not based on efficiency, it will be difficult to play the role of controlling rights market in the restrictions on the management in position, the decrease in agency costs and so on.