The performance of a MIMO system with adaptive modulation (AM) and space-time coding over Ricean fading channels for perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI) is presented. The fading gain value is partitioned into a number of regions by which the modulation is adapted according to the region the fading gain falls in. Under a target bit error rate (BER) constraint, the switching thresholds for AM are given. Based on these results, we derive the calculation formulae of the theoretical spectrum efficiency (SE) and average BER. As a result, closed-form SE expression and accurate BER expression are respectively obtained. Besides, using the approximation of complementary error function, a tightly closed-form approximation of average BER is also derived to simplify the calculation of accurate theoretical BER. Computer simulation shows that the theoretical SE and BER are in good agreement with the corresponding simulation, and the approximate BER is also close to the accurate one. The results show that the AM scheme in Ricean fading channel provides better SE than that in Rayleigh fading channel due to the direct-path propagation, and has performance degradation in SE and BER for imperfect CSI.