is an economically important food species in China. In recent years, culture, various problems such as disease, larval degeneration and natural resource depletion have resulted in economic losses in this species. Therefore, studies on selective breeding are important. In this paper, the growth performance, heritability and breeding value of mating experiments. , a total of 200 mature crabs were taken from a core breeding population of the new variety of ‘Huangxuan No.1’. Fifty males and 150 females were used for mating. Those that died or had not mated were removed from the study. The remaining 92 females were moved to an indoor pond for overwintering. In April 2011, only 35 females extruded a fertilized brood of eggs. From April 10 to 16 of 2011, 20 full-sib families were produced. On day 80 and day 100, about 50 individuals were randomly sampled from each family and were measured for carapace width, that the body weight was 16.20% and 19.35% higher on day 80 and day 100, respectively, compared with the natural population. The heritability on day 80 and day 100 ranged from 0.164 to 0.304, and from 0.117 to 0.241, respectively, indicating that family selection is an effective way to breed Analysis of the selection efficiency based on the breeding value or phenotypic value revealed that the breeding value was higher than the phenotypic value for growth traits (11.1%–19.38%). Hence, we suggest that the efficiency of breeding value-based selection is higher than that of phenotypic selection.