This paper directly investigates the “greasing money” and “protection money” effect of corruption based on Chinese firm data from 2005 Investment Climate Survey. Entertainment and travel cost (ETC) is used as a proxy for firm corruption. First, we identify a significantly positive effect of bribes on firm profitability for the full sample and non-state firms, but not for SOEs. Then we find that corruption can serve as “protection money” for non-state firms by demonstrating that bribes significantly reduce effective tax rate. We further show that corruption can function as “greasing money” for non-SOEs by empirically proving that bribes significantly reduce red tape and increase the probability of obtaining government procurement contracts. However, we fail to find any significant effect of corruption on helping firms ease financial constraints or obtain bank loans, regardless of ownership types. Therefore, this paper provides a new insight into the growth model of China?s non-state sector.