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This paper attempts to investigate the determinants of the capital structure of a sample of 972 listed companies on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange in China in 2003. Various theories, namely, the trade-off, pecking order and agency theories, are deployed to explain and predict the signs and significance of each factor identified by Ragan and Zingales (1995) and Booth et al. (2001). Furthermore, we include institutional shareholdings, including state agency shareholdings, state-owned shareholdings and privately owned shareholdings, as corporate governance variables to examine the effects of corporate structure on the debt financing behaviours. As well documented, we find that profitability is negatively related to capital structure at a highly significant level. The size and risk of the firms are positively related to the debt ratio – but only in term of market value measures of capital …