This paper investigates the legitimisation of shared governance in the Chinese higher education sector by applying Norman Fairclough’s three-level discourse analysis on 13 Chinese university statutes and qualitative semi-structured interviews with 22 university administrators, faculty members, students and social representatives. Two research questions of how university statute texts articulate shared governance, and how shared governance is practically implemented are answered. The study finds that Chinese university statute discourses officially legitimise shared governance in various manifestations, by replacing management with governance in statute texts, explicitly using democracy-related phrases, especially establishing a ‘joint meeting mechanism’ at both institutional and departmental levels, and wording ‘multiple-stakeholder participation’ in university affairs. Regarding the implementation, shared governance on the one hand is a recognised ideal of governance structure to embrace among all different stakeholders and there has been increasing shared governance praxis compared with Chinese universities’ own past. On the other hand, the degree of ‘sharing’ in the overall governance implementation remains to be further improved compared with the ideal state stipulated in discourses, and tokenism is identified in its practical implementation. Administrative unprofessionalism is identified as a catalyst for such tokenism that leads to the ‘incomplete shared governance’.