Abstract: Aiming at developing an effective performance evaluation system for commercial banks, study is conducted to discover factors that have effect on performance of commercial banks. By analyzing the financial and governance characteristics of the banks, a set of factors are collected. Then, based on the mixed panel data from the listed commercial banks in 1998~2008, a multivariate regression model is proposed. With this model, ordinal analysis is used to select the factors that have significant effect on the performance of commercial banks. In this way, a performance evaluation system for the commercial banks is developed. Based on the system, it is found that the joint-stock commercial banks have the highest the performance rank, the stateowned commercial banks are next, and the performance of city commercial banks is relatively low.