This paper investigates the relationship between ESG performance and corporate financial performance (CFP) using data from 1,443 Chinese A-share firms from 2013 - 2022. This paper employs the Bloomberg ESG disclosure score and multiple financial metrics dissecting ESG’s financial influence on profitability (Return on Assets and Equity, Tobin’s Q), operating efficiency (Asset Turnover), and financial stability (Altman’s Z score). Multiple fixed-effects OLS models are utilized to study the ESG-CFP relationship across years, sectors, nature of ownership, COVID-19 crisis periods, and ESG pillars. The results show that ESG performance not only is positively and significantly related to financial performance metrics, but also buffers against the adverse financial shocks due to COVID-19. In the Chinese context, state-owned firms extract higher financial gains from ESG than private firms, and the positive ESG-CFP relationship is mostly driven by the environmental pillar, instead of the social and governance pillars. The findings also support the non-linear relationship between ESG-CFP across the market but did not find sufficient evidence for an inverted U-shaped connection between ESG and the financial metrics studied. This paper also fills the gap by providing an overview of the development of Chinese ESG policies, which demonstrated distinctive regulatory characteristics of institutional-led and environmental-led frameworks. As the findings support a strong business case for improving ESG performance for listed firms, the Chinese market may serve as an important reference for ESG practices within emerging markets.