As an important channel to achieve common prosperity through "the third distribution" of earnings, and an important way to be a good "corporate citizen", does charitable donation benefit others and itself? The relevant literatures that study the relationship between donation and financial performance have not reached a consensus, the different variable measurement and different theory hypothesis maybe the reason for the different results. This paper takes A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2006 to 2020 as observations, and tests how the dynamic change with the amount of charitable donation affects the financial performance of enterprises systematically in different levels. The empirical results indicate that, the dynamic change of corporate donation is the reason for the inconsistent relationship between charitable donation and financial performance, and constantly increasing donations by enterprises can achieve a "win-win" situation for both social welfare and their own financial performance. That means the conclusion supports the "shareholder value hypothesis" in some extent. To be more specific, on the one hand, both increase in donation and continuous donation can significantly improve the financial performance of the company, and there is a greater effect on the improvement of financial performance when the company donates more in the current period than the last period in which it donates too. On the other hand, both decrease in donation and continuous non-donation will significantly reduce the financial performance of the company, and there is a greater effect on the reduction of financial performance when the company directly reduce the donation to zero in the current period but has donated in the last period. From the perspective of regional economy, it is found that compared with the eastern region or the regions with higher level of economic development, there is weaker or even irrelevant relationship between the dynamic change of charitable donation and the financial performance of the company in the western region or the regions with lower level of economic development. From the perspective of advertising, it reveals that advertising cannot replace the charitable donation, which means corporate image established by the advertising is different from the image of corporate citizen established by the charitable donation. Advertising can enhance the effects on the improvement of financial performance especially when the company increases the charitable donation or sustain to donate, but it will worsen the effects on the reduction of financial performance when the company continued to do no charitable donations. From different types of property rights, it finds that whether the enterprise is state-owned enterprise (SOE) or not, increasing the charitable donation can improve its financial performance. Continuous donation strengthens the positive effect of charitable donation on financial performance in SOEs. The negative effect of decrease in donation and continuous non-donation can be restrained in SOEs. That means there is a good moderating effect for the property right on the relationship between charitable donation and financial performance. Furthermore, a stepwise regression model is established to test the mediating effect, it shows that the relationship with key customers is a channel through which changes in charitable donation affect the financial performance, indicating that increase in donation can improve the financial performance through enhancing the relationship with key customers. At last, we use PSM to alleviate endogeneity problem, the conclusion is still valid. The contributions of this paper are mainly reflected in the following three aspects: Firstly, it enriches the research on the relationship between charitable donation and financial performance. Secondly, the conclusion offers guidance for the enterprises to perform charitable donation with their strategies. Thirdly, it also provides empirical evidence for the SOEs to perform more CSR in various areas under the guidance of government policies.