OFFICIAL WORKFLOW / 01
Use the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System before interpreting risk.
The registration search answers a narrow but necessary question: which Chinese legal entity is behind the documents you received? Do not use an English storefront name as if it were the registered identity.
To find a company in China, start with its exact Chinese legal name or 18-character code. An English website or sales name can help you ask for those details, but does not replace them.
Who is China’s registrar of companies, and where is the business registry?
Companies register with local market regulation authorities at or above county level. The local office is usually called an Administration for Market Regulation (AMR) in English. The national State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) sets rules and supervises. It is not a central registrar like Companies House in the UK.
In practice that means a company registered in Shenzhen sits on file with the Shenzhen market regulation bureau. There is no separate national registrar holding a second copy. There is no central counter, no central email, and no national certified-copy service you can order from abroad.
The registry you can actually read is the disclosure system; the registration office itself publishes nothing. Registered particulars are published through the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (国家企业信用信息公示系统, GSXT) at gsxt.gov.cn. That is the public window onto those local registers, and it is what the steps below search. It is Chinese-only, and from outside China it may not load at all: what I measured, and what to do instead.
A China company search or China business registry check uses this same public system. Search with the exact Chinese name or 18-character code.
A certificate sent by the supplier still needs to be matched against the live record. A red company seal does not settle the identity. Read the limits of checking a company chop: there is no public chop register for this comparison.
What is the GSXT website address, and is there an English version?
The address is www.gsxt.gov.cn. It is frequently mistyped: gsxt.gov.con and www.gsxt.gov.en are both common enough to show up as search queries, and the correct domain ends in .gov.cn. The full Chinese name is 国家企业信用信息公示系统; in English it is usually rendered National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System. Some provinces expose their own sub-domains (for example sc.gsxt.gov.cn), but the national front door is the one above.
There is no usable English version. Searches for “gsxt.gov.cn english” and its variants recur every month. In our front-page scan of eight official Chinese verification sources on 8 August 2026, none of the three pages that loaded carried an English-version marker. Plan on reading Chinese or having the record read for you.
Look for these two field labels.
- 统一社会信用代码: the 18-character Unified Social Credit Code. Check its structure here first. A mistyped code is the most common reason a search returns nothing.
- 登记状态: the registration status line: 存续 / 在业 (live), 歇业 (dormant), 吊销 (licence revoked), 注销 (deregistered). What each one means for your order: 吊销 is the one that looks alive from outside.
The site will not open, or the search will not run. What now?
First, the useful distinction: GSXT answers people and refuses machines. Opened in an ordinary browser it works. A script, API client or bulk tool instead receives 521 and a block of obfuscated JavaScript. A browser solves that challenge silently. A scraper does not. We re-measured this on 14 August 2026 from two unrelated Chinese networks: a consumer broadband line and a cloud host. The registry returned 521 on every attempt while www.gov.cn and www.samr.gov.cn answered 200 in the same seconds. The full measurement record is here.
Three consequences worth knowing before you spend an afternoon on it:
- “Automated China company data” is harder than it sounds. There is no open official API behind this window, and the front door actively refuses automation. Any service offering instant bulk Chinese registry data is either licensed commercial data with its own lag, or it is defeating that challenge.
- A failure is not evidence about your supplier. If the page will not load, that is a fact about the portal and your route to it. It says nothing about the company. Record what you tried and when, and do not read it as a red flag.
- From outside China the picture is worse. Several of these hosts are slow or unreachable on ordinary international routes. The standard advice to “just check the official source yourself” quietly assumes a connection many buyers do not have.
The dataset includes the method and raw observations from two mainland vantage points. It records six 521 refusals alongside twelve 200 control responses. All five tested client profiles were also refused, despite using increasingly browser-like settings.
Cite the dataset via DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21959355 or its Harvard Dataverse mirror. Read the findings in the registry answers people and refuses programs.
You still have three options without reaching the portal. Validate the 18-character code offline in your browser to catch transcription errors. Read the registered scope text the supplier already sent you. Or have the record read from the China side, with the source and query date stated.
We do not attempt to defeat that challenge, proxy the portal, or cache its pages. That constraint is the reason the China-side check is performed by a person in a browser, because crawlers get refused.
Collect the exact search keys
Ask for a current business licence and copy the full Chinese registered name and Unified Social Credit Code exactly as shown. Keep the English trading name, marketplace account and salesperson name as separate aliases.
Under China’s current unified-code rules, the code is a nationwide unique identity code assigned to an organisation and displayed on its business licence. The official coding standard is GB 32100-2015.
Search the official GSXT registry
Open the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System and search the exact Chinese name or Unified Social Credit Code. Use the code when available because it is the stronger identity key.
The registry’s official help page says name searches can be fuzzy and can return up to 100 records. Do not select a similar-looking result without matching the code or other identity fields.
Tested on 5 August 2026. From one consumer connection inside mainland China, www.gsxt.gov.cn answered every attempt with HTTP 521. We repeated the request three times, with and without a browser user agent, while www.gov.cn returned 200 from the same machine at the same moment. HTTP 521 means a server responded with an error, so the registry was reachable but not serving. On 8 August 2026 we re-tested without reference to the earlier run and reproduced the same result. China company registry availability keeps every status code, the control hosts, the stated limits and one conclusion we withdrew.
On 8 August 2026 we tested eight official Chinese verification sources from inside mainland China. We requested each front page three times. Five of eight did not serve a page. None of the three loaded pages showed an English-version marker. These are dated access observations, not a finding about your supplier.
We have no trustworthy measurement of whether the registry opens from outside China, and we would rather say that than guess. The overseas egress available to us fails against government hosts of every country we tried. That includes www.abf.gov.au, which serves normally from China. The test therefore measures its own behaviour only. An earlier version of this page read that failure as a finding about Chinese government sites; that was wrong, and this paragraph replaces it. Your own network may behave differently: test it yourself, and re-test later; no result is permanent.
What a failed connection does not tell you: it is not evidence that the record is missing, that the company is unregistered, or that the supplier is hiding something. It only tells you that you could not reach the source from where you are.
Try these steps in order.
- Ask the supplier for the 18-character Unified Social Credit Code in writing, then check it against the business licence and the contract. This costs nothing, needs no access to the portal, and catches the most common mismatches on its own. Our code checker verifies the structure and check digit in your browser before you go any further.
- Ask a counterpart inside China to run the search and send you the output together with the date they ran it.
- Have the check run China-side and returned with its sources, the query date and the limits of what it covers. That is what this desk does.
The official service may also require interactive verification even when it does load. This guide does not bypass CAPTCHA, proxy the portal, automate data harvesting or mirror the registry.
Match the live record to the deal documents
Record the query date and compare the legal name, Unified Social Credit Code, entity status, registered address, legal representative and business scope with the licence and contract. Then compare the contracting seller and bank beneficiary.
China’s market-entity registration regulation identifies fields such as name, entity type, business scope, address, registered capital and legal representative as general registration matters. Changes must be registered, so a dated live result matters more than an undated screenshot sent by a supplier.
Read more about the field that needs explaining.
Read what a supplier’s registered business scope can, and cannot, signal about a factory role →
Read why a registered address and claimed factory site must be checked separately →
- Identity: English and Chinese names · legal representative and contract signatory · domain lookup limits.
- Licence: the printed fields · photo limits · status terms · registered capital.
- Record history: company changes.
- Factory role: trader or manufacturer · import-export wording.
- Production site: factory-profile evidence.
Separate identity confirmation from supplier approval
If the official record and deal documents align, continue to product-specific compliance, manufacturing-role and payment controls. If a material field differs, hold the decision until the supplier explains the difference through a known and independently verified channel.
A registered wholesaler can be a legitimate supplier, and a company with manufacturing wording can still outsource your order. Registry language is a clue about the entity. It proves nothing about the site, equipment, capacity or quality system behind your product.
If you found this supplier through a platform listing, also review what Alibaba’s own signals do and do not verify. Those signals are badges, reviews and Trade Assurance. The registry match and the platform layer answer different questions.
Continue with the China supplier due diligence sequence →
Use the free factory-or-trader reading for a narrow first-pass signal →
Then verify the production site, processes, certificate scope and fit for your order →
Before payment, match that registered identity to the seller, invoice and bank beneficiary →
Treat “no result” as an unresolved identity
No-result does not, by itself, prove that a supplier is fraudulent. It can reflect a copied-name error, use of an English alias, a changed entity name, an inaccessible session or invalid search conditions.
Re-copy the Chinese name and code from the licence, remove added spaces or punctuation, try the exact code, and preserve the failed query date. If the identity still cannot be matched, hold the transaction and request corrected official identity evidence. Guessing which similar company is yours is how deposits get lost.
If access or matching remains unresolved, prepare a dated China-side human check →
AFTER THE MATCH / 02
What is still open after the search succeeds
This page ends with a matched entity. That is where the useful part begins. On 21–22 August 2026, I queried nineteen registry dimensions for 45 Chinese manufacturers. The frame included every company on the NHTSA vehicle-manufacturer list that resolved to exactly one Chinese entity. The purpose was to see what a successful match actually hands you.
| Available once you have the entity | Companies |
|---|---|
| Legal form and current status | 45 of 45 |
| Shareholders and annual reports | 44 of 45 |
| Change history | 41 of 45 |
| Import/export credit record | 41 of 45 |
| Qualification certificates | 36 of 45 |
| A branch at the production address | 8 of 45 |
| Any current sanction record | 0 of 45 |
The first five rows are the payoff: a matched entity unlocks a substantial, free, statutory file on almost every company. Run those before spending money anywhere else. The last two rows are the warning that comes with it. No sanction record exists for anybody here, so a clean screen distinguishes nothing. And only 8 of 45 give you any public link between the company and a production site.
The registry snapshot in that run arrives as an image, so treat it as evidence to attach. There are no fields to compare. The same 45 companies appear throughout this site: one batch that I keep asking different questions. The batch itself is described in the NHTSA manufacturer study.
MATCH TABLE / 03
What to compare before proceeding
| Field | Compare against | Proceed, hold or escalate |
|---|---|---|
| Chinese legal name | Business licence, contract, invoice and official record | Proceed only when the seller identity is consistent or a documented relationship explains the difference |
| Unified Social Credit Code | Business licence and official record | Hold when codes differ, are missing from a supplied licence, or resolve to another entity |
| Registration status | Current official record | Escalate inactive, revoked, cancelled or otherwise material status wording before contracting |
| Address and legal representative | Licence, contract and current record | Ask for a dated explanation when material details have changed |
| Business scope | Quoted role and product | Use only as a first-pass role signal; obtain order-specific manufacturing evidence separately |
| Contract seller and payee | Contract, invoice and bank beneficiary | Hold an unexplained third-party or personal beneficiary |
METHOD / 04
How this guide was prepared
Currawong’s China-side verification desk reviewed the live official sources below on 30 July 2026. We mapped each source to the narrow claim it can support. How to search, how the unified code works, which fields are registration matters, and why the live record should be dated.
| Official host | What buyers use it for | Result (3 of 3) |
|---|---|---|
www.gsxt.gov.cn | Company registry (GSXT) | 521 |
www.creditchina.gov.cn | Penalties, dishonesty lists | 412 |
sbj.cnipa.gov.cn | Trademark office | 403 |
credit.customs.gov.cn | Customs enterprise credit | 412 |
cx.cnca.cn | CCC certification queries | 521 |
wenshu.court.gov.cn | Court judgments | 200 |
zxgk.court.gov.cn | Court enforcement records | 200 (browser UA only) |
openstd.samr.gov.cn | National standards (GB) | 200 |
Control: www.gov.cn | Government host | 200 |
Control: www.baidu.com | Commercial host | 200 |
This guide sends you to the registry, so it owes you the state of the door. On the test date GSXT did not serve its front page (521) from a consumer connection inside mainland China, while both control hosts answered normally. Refusal is still an answer, but either way the page did not load.
We did not inspect any reader’s supplier, factory, product or transaction. This page is general research guidance. It is neither legal advice nor a product-compliance opinion, a factory audit or a guarantee of transaction safety. Official portal availability and displayed records can change.
PRIMARY SOURCES / 05
Official sources used for this guide
Links and page content were checked on 30 July 2026. The live official record remains authoritative for a specific entity and query date.
- National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity SystemOfficial nationwide market-entity credit search by Chinese name, Unified Social Credit Code or registration number.
- GSXT: Official system helpSearch inputs, fuzzy-search result limits, no-result behaviour and source-responsibility boundaries.
- SAMR: Measures for unified social credit code managementCurrent nationwide uniqueness, one-organisation/one-code and business-licence display rules, effective 1 February 2026.
- SAMR National Standards: GB 32100-2015Current coding rule for the unified social credit identifier.
- State Council: Regulation on market entity registrationRegistration fields, business-licence effect, changes, cancellation and public disclosure framework.
COMMON QUESTIONS / 06
Keep these four boundaries clear
- Can I search with an English supplier name?
- The official registry is built around the registered Chinese identity. Ask for the Chinese legal name and Unified Social Credit Code instead of relying on a translated brand. This is the most common reason people cannot verify a Chinese company on the first attempt.
- Does a matching registration prove the supplier is reliable?
- No. It confirms the matched registered identity at the query time. Reliability, capacity, product compliance, delivery and payment safety need separate evidence.
- Does business scope prove the company owns a factory?
- No. Scope wording is a first-pass clue. Site control, process capability and order-specific production still require separate evidence or an audit.
- What if the bank beneficiary is another company?
- Hold payment until the relationship is disclosed, documented and confirmed through an independently verified contact channel. A mismatch is a question to resolve. On its own it is no proof of fraud. Verify the bank account details before payment →