With the expansion of enterprise organization and management specialization, shareholders no longer have the ability to run their companies on their own, so there is the emergence of professional managers. Owner and manager in the company objectives are inconsistent, asymmetric information causes, "Principal-agent problem". To address the separation of ownership and management of agency problems, the need for strengthening the monitoring of operators, a mechanism for maintaining shareholders ' equity, corporate governance systems have begun to emerge. Most prior studies on corporate governance have focused on listed companiesonly few research investigates state-owned enterprises. Since state-owned enterprises are an important part of the national economic construction, it's important to study the association between corporate governance and performance of these firms. In this research, four state-owned enterprises are the main object of study. Case study method is adopted to explore the association between state-owned enterprises corporate governance evaluation results and operating performance. This paper also examinesy the role of the independent directors and the labor representives on the board, and the impact of their involovment on the board on the enterprises’ decisions. The results from this study may help regulator to promote and improve the corporate governance of the state-owned enterprises. The findings suggest that the establishment and implementation of the corporate governance of state-owned enterprises may enhancce non-financial performance. To promote the effectiveness of the evaluation of corporate governance system, this study recommends that the results of the assessment can be further applied to government-owned undertakings, direct investment undertakings and businesses owned by the investment undertakings.. This study further finds that the frequency of speaking in the board meeting by independent directors is positively associated with the effectiveness of the corporate governance and operating performance of state-owned enterprises. Such finding may be attributable to the variety of issues concerned by the independent directors.