This paper hypothesizes that the threat of losing listing status in China’s distressed ST (specialtreatment) firms kick starts a corporate control market that does not exist otherwise. The incumbent controlling shareholder, facing the possibility of losing control right, will have to“tunnel back” the value he has extracted from the firm before to boost the distressed firm’s accounting performance. This part of value is captured by the cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) surrounding ST event. We further argue that ST CARs present themselves as alternative measure of private benefits of control, distinguished from the ones used in Barclay and Holderness (1989) and Nenova (2000). Studying 66 listing companies that had become ST between 1998 and 2000 in China’s stock market, we find that the 22-month cumulative abnormal returns run as high as 29% on average. Based on a game theoretic model, we find that the control value released through the contest for corporate control right is positively related the largest shareholder’s shareholding, concentration of shares held by other largest shareholders, but negatively correlated with the firm’s leverage ratio. Our empirical evidence confirms these hypotheses.