This article investigates how divergence of voting rights and cash flow rights affects firms’ tax avoidance behavior. Using data from China during 2001 to 2009, we predict that firms with the divergence between voting rights and cash flow rights have the tendency to avoid tax payment. This result suggests that the more separate between voting rights and cash flow rights, the easier for firms to avoid tax payment. Our paper sheds light on the effects that divergence of voting rights and cash flow rights in shaping firms’ tax avoidance behavior. We also examine the results that effective tax rate, which is one of the tax avoidance behaviors, is lower by adoption on the new IFRS-based China Accounting Standards (CAS) than that under the old China Accounting Standards. These results are consistent with the notion that when the divergence is becoming increase between voting rights and cash flow rights, the incentives are getting large for controlling shareholders to sacrifice minority shareholders 'wealth to pursue themselves private benefits with lower corporate disclosure.