The present study tested the activation of different phonological units of Chinese characters during silent sentence reading. Fifty-five participants were tested in an eye-tracking experiment. A highly predictable target character in each experimental sentence was replaced by four types of substitutes (i.e. no-violation, tone-violation, rime-violation, and double-violation). The participants exhibited a shorter total reading time in the no-violation and tone-violation conditions than in the double-violation baseline condition, whereas the rime-violation condition did not differ from the baseline. Moreover, the participants did not benefit from tonal information in addition to syllable-level phonological overlap. Our findings are consistent with a notion of late phonological activation in Chinese, and therefore suggest a direct route of lexical activation bypassing phonological mediation during visual word recognition.