The market-oriented debt-to-equity swap (DES) as deleveraging means is being vigorously promoted by the Chinese government. This paper collects the 88 DES projects since the launch of DES in 2016 to the end of 2018 and gives a statistical description of the DES enterprises. We use the FN-CHK method to identify zombie enterprises, find that among the 74 DES enterprises with financial information disclosure, 19 enterprises are zombie enterprises. The bond market has given a significant negative reaction to the DES of zombie enterprises, which have reduced bond valuation by 1.961% during the [-30,30] event window period. In the stock market, the CAR of DES to private enterprise in [-5,5] window period is -17.24%. Despite the reduction in leverage, zombie enterprises fail to stop their business downturn while non-zombie enterprises exhibit substantial improvements in financial performance after DES. As current DES is unable to bring expected value-added effects in both short term and long term, we propose further efforts to be exerted in improving the efficiency of DES.