Hong Kong attained champion of the PIRLS 2011 that aroused keen interest in understanding the underlying reasons of a non-alphabetic language. The study aimed at unravelling various aspects of the student and home factors which contributed to remarkable Chinese reading performance. Totally 3,875 students from 132 primary schools completed the comprehension tests and student questionnaire. The home questionnaire was filled by 3,682 parents. Structural equation modeling was performed to test the hypothesized model. Results supported the model as tenable, which explained 34% of the variance. The effects of parental background on reading achievement mainly went indirectly via early reading abilities, reading motivation and reading self-efficacy. This study allows future comparisons across a range of alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages.