This paper focuses on the process and principle of parsing, which is an essential task for machine to understand the syntactic, semantic structure of a sentence. First, a series of machine analysis procedures such as word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging and parsing of Chinese sentences are visually represented by using Cparser, a rule-based constituency parser developed by Peking University. Next, to better understand parsing mechanism, we explain in detail how the linguistic knowledge is embodied in the lexical, syntactic and semantic component of Cparser, showing their complex interplay that allows automatic parsing. As a practical example, a Chinese textbook treebank is also constructed using Cparser. According to the theoretical and practical discussion in this paper, Peking University Cparser, which is easy to reflect and modify linguistic knowledge, is expected to be widely used as an analysis and verification tool for Chinese grammar research.