It aims to put forward a new method of tension control for unwinding process of printing machine based on active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) strategy. Firstly, according to the working mechanism of unwinding system, a nonlinear mathematical model was established for the unwinding system to derive system orders and input coefficients. Then tension controller and tension observer were designed based on the model and the ADRC technology. Finally the internal robustness and disturbance rejection of the tension controller were demonstrated by simulating and experimental study. Under the control of ADRC, the tension T2 was not affected by the change of R1 and ω2, and the stability of the 60 N was achieved quickly without overshoot; with the decrease of R1 and the increase of ω2, the error generated by ADRC control was much smaller than that of PID. According to the results of simulation and experiments, the proposed ADRC controller has better internal robustness and disturbance rejection than traditional proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller.