Abstract: The board of directors is the core of corporate governance. Commercial banks can improve governance system and business performance by introducing foreign capital and encouraging foreign shareholders to appoint directors. The data of 121 commercial banks in China from 2007 to 2016 is taken as samples from the perspective of foreign shareholders' participation in board governance for the first time. In this paper, the grouping comparison method is used based on the fixed effect model.The empirical part adopts the fixed effect model,and uses ROA and ROE as two indicators to measure the performance of commercial banks and compare the differences of the effects.
The results show that:(1)there is a significant positive correlation between the board size,the proportion of non-executive directors, the frequency of board meetings and the number of professional committees and the performance of commercial banks;(2)with the increase of the proportion of foreign directors in the board of directors,the positive correlation between the size of the board of directors, the frequency of board meetings,the number of professional committees and business performance has been significantly weakened. However,the positive correlation between the proportion of non-executive directors and business performance was significantly enhanced.
Accordingly,this paper recommends:(1)foreign directors should be encouraged to participate in board governance,and the size of the board of directors should be appropriately expanded;appropriate non-executive directors should be provided to foreign shareholders; the frequency of board meetings should be moderately increased;and the system of professional committees should be actively improved;(2)to control the unreasonable increase in the proportion of foreign directors in the board of directors and ensure the substantial independence between foreign directors and independent directors.

Key words: foreign equity, board characteristics, performance of commercial banks