As an excellent photocatalyst which can compete with TiO2, BiOCl has triggered increasing attention. However, the practical application of BiOCl has been significantly limited by the fast recombination of the photoinduced electron-hole charge pairs. In this study, to further enhance the separation efficiency of photoinduced electron-hole charge pairs of BiOCl, a series of efficient BiOCl photocatalysts were prepared by C-70 surface modification. The trapping experiments reveal that the main active species were determined to be superoxide radicals (O-2(center dot-)) and holes (h(+)) under simulated sunlight irradiation. The surface photovoltage spectroscopy (SPS) demonstrates that separation of the photoinduced electron-hole pairs has been significantly promoted, forming more center dot OH, proven by terephthalic acid photoluminescence probing technique. The photocatalytic evaluation results display that the C-70/BiOCl photocatalysts exhibit much higher photocatalytic activity in decolorization of rhodamine B (RhB) than that of the bare BiOCl under the simulated sunlight irradiation. The excellent electron acceptability of C-70 is conducive to the separation of the photogenerated carriers and results in efficient formation of O-2(center dot-), proven by the results of SPS and electron spin-resonance (ESR), therefore the photocatalytic performance of C-70/BiOCl has been greatly improved. Based on all these observations, an enhancement mechanism in photocatalytic performance of C-70/BiOCl was proposed. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.