From the perspective of enterprise life-cycle, this paper utilizes the 2007-2012 data of listed manufacturing companies in China for an analysis on the effects of total debt level , debt maturity structure and debt source on enterprise per-formance at different stages of life cycle .The results show that the debt level , long-term debt and short-term debt are all nega-tively correlated to enterprise performance in the whole life cycle , but the extent of their correlation varies at different stages:the short-term debt has stronger negative effects than the long-term debt on enterprise performa...