Listed companies in China may use off-balance sheet liabilities，non-share-real-debts and accounting methods for leverage manipulation. Leverage manipulation will further push up a company’s real leverage， weaken the supervision of the regulatory authorities on the leverage of listed companies，polish the de-leverage effect，and eventually lead to greater corporate financial risk and systemic financial risk. After a summary of the leverage manipulation methods of listed companies in China，our paper proposes a method of leverage manipulation，XLT-LEVM，based on the sample data of non-financial listed companies in China from 2007 to 2017. It finds that there are exactly leverage manipulations in listed companies. The higher the book leverage and degree of financial constraints，as well as the stronger the deleveraging pressure，the higher the real leverage will be. These results can not only enrich and deepen the research on the leverage problem of listed companies，but also provide theoretical and methodological basis for research on the related issues of leverage manipulation in the future. We ycan also provide policy references for strengthening the supervision of China’s capital market and optimizing the evaluation of de-leveraging effect.