Aiming at the status quo of repeated “greenwashing” behavior in enterprises, this paper empirically tests the impact of performance expectation gap on enterprise “greenwashing” behavior,using China’s A-share listed companies in heavily polluted industries from 2010 to 2019 as samples. The results show that performance expectation gap could induce enterprise “greenwashing”behavior, which is mainly manifested as the selective disclosure of environmental activities. Moreover,with the extension of performance expectation gap duration, the impact of performance expectation gap on enterprise “greenwashing”behavior would be more significant. Further mechanism test results show that the performance expectation gap could worsen enterprise financing constraints and exacerbate managers’ shortsightedness, thereby affecting “greenwashing” behavior. In addition, different types of regulatory tools have different governance effects on“greenwashing”.Specifically, command-and-control environmental regulations and local media supervision can curb enterprise “greenwashing”behavior driven by performance expectation gap, while the governance effects of market incentives and public participation environmental regulations, and off-site media supervision are not significant.