How to Access China's Official Company Record Systems
Almost every fact worth knowing about a Chinese supplier sits in one of six government systems. All of them are public. All of them are also hard to reach from outside mainland China. Here is what each system holds, how to search it, and where international buyers usually get stuck.
Why you cannot simply look it up
The six official systems
Each system answers a different question. Together they cover identity, ownership, risk history, litigation, intellectual property and export activity.
National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (gsxt.gov.cn)
What it holds: The master registry. Registered name, Unified Social Credit Code, legal representative, registered capital, establishment date, registration status, registered address, business scope, shareholder information and annual filings.
How to search it: Enter the company name or the 18-digit USCC and clear the slider CAPTCHA. Access from outside China is frequently slow or blocked, and the site occasionally insists on a mainland mobile number.
China Enforcement Information Disclosure Network (zxgk.court.gov.cn)
What it holds: Enforcement records: who was ordered to pay and did not. Covers dishonest judgment debtors, enforcement cases and consumption restriction orders.
How to search it: Search by company name or by the ID number of the legal representative. The interface is Chinese-only and returns case listings rather than a tidy company profile.
Credit China (creditchina.gov.cn)
What it holds: Aggregated credit and compliance data: administrative penalties, abnormal operation listings, the serious illegal and dishonest list, plus tax and customs irregularities.
How to search it: Search by company name or USCC. Full results generally require registering with a mainland phone number; the public view shows only a limited number of entries.
China Judgments Online (wenshu.court.gov.cn)
What it holds: Court judgments. Civil and commercial disputes, contract cases, debt claims, and the reasoning behind each ruling.
How to search it: Search by company name, case number or court. Access has been restricted since 2021 and now generally requires real-name registration tied to a mainland identity or phone number.
CNIPA (cnipa.gov.cn) and China Trademark Office
What it holds: Intellectual property: registered trademarks, patent filings, trademark ownership, and whether a mark is live, opposed or cancelled.
How to search it: Trademarks search by name or registration number; patents by applicant, title or publication number. The interface is Chinese-only and split across several sub-sites.
Customs credit information (credit.customs.gov.cn)
What it holds: Customs import and export credit status: whether a company is registered as an importer or exporter, its customs credit tier, and any customs penalties.
How to search it: Search by company name or USCC. Access is restricted, and a Chinese company name is effectively required - an English name usually returns nothing at all.
Common questions
Are these Chinese company records free to access?
The records themselves are public and free. What costs you time is access: unreliable connections from abroad, Chinese-only interfaces, and registration steps that expect a mainland phone number. A single company is also often spread across three or four systems, each searched separately.
Can I check a Chinese company without reading Chinese?
Partly. Browser translation can render the pages, but it routinely mangles company names, business scope wording and legal terms - precisely the fields you need to read correctly. Business scope, for instance, distinguishes manufacturing from trading by individual characters.
Why does a search sometimes return nothing?
An empty result is not proof that a company is clean. It can mean the name was transliterated differently, the entity is registered under a variant name, the system was unreachable at that moment, or the record genuinely does not exist. Telling these cases apart is the main reason buyers ask us to run the checks.
Want these checks run for you?
Send us the company name, its Unified Social Credit Code or its website. We search all six official systems, translate what we find and deliver a structured English report in 2-5 days, from $35.
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