This paper examines the performance of 16 major Chinese commercial banks. In particular, we employ a new way of ranking the banks based on their average marginal impact on structural efficiency. We find important differences between our ranking results and that of the conventional super-efficiency approach. We argue that in case of Chinese commercial banks the new way of ranking the banks is more in line with expectations based on various key performance indicators. The findings further reconfirm that the performance of the large commercial banks surpass that of the small to medium sized commercial banks.