In emerging markets characterized by weak institutions, the expropriation of minority shareholders by large shareholders is the primary concern in corporate governance. One important way to indurate the protection of minority shareholder rights is the implementation of cumulative voting (CV) scheme for board election. China carried out an experiment of regulatory reform to introduce the CV rule to many listed companies in China. In 2002, the Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission released the Code of Corporate Governance for Listed Companies'', aiming to elevate minority shareholder rights and to improve corporate governance. In this paper, based on our unique hand-collected data set, we investigate whether the use of CV has substantial effects on board composition and the characteristics of elected board directors, corporate policies and further on firm value. To mitigate the endogeneity'' or self-selection'' problem, this paper adopts matching methods to construct control groups and conduct DID style analysis to further reduce econometrical confoundedness. To increase the robustness of our main empirical results, we employ two different matching methods (Barber and Lyon method and Coarsened exact matching'' method) to construct two samples. To assess the efficacy of the implementation of CV, we examine whether the directors elected via CV are different from those elected via straight voting in terms of personal characteristics of directors including their education qualifications, professional experiences (accountant, lawyer, engineer, economist, etc.), managerial experiences (CEO/chairman experiences), work experiences in the same industry, and political connections (former central, or local government officials). We find that the proportion of directors as representatives of the second largest shareholder significantly increases under the CV rule based on a clean subsample where the top ten shareholders are unrelated. We also find that the implementation of CV has created some positive changes in the quality of directors and the independence'' of independent directors. But the incremental improvements are not significant enough to curb tunneling activities and generate substantial positive effects on firm performance. Our findings imply that the CV reform has achieved some success, bringing some positive changes to corporate boards, but the success is still limited to a large degree. The broad institutional and legal environment in China remains weak, which imposes constraints on the functioning of the reform scheme.