China Company Verification: How to Check a Chinese Company Is Real
How to verify a Chinese company is real: the official gsxt.gov.cn registry, reading the 18-digit Unified Social Credit Code, business license fields, and red-flag lists.
How to verify a Chinese company is real: the official gsxt.gov.cn registry, reading the 18-digit Unified Social Credit Code, business license fields, and red-flag lists.
Every legally registered company in mainland China appears in one free government database: the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (GSXT, 国家企业信用信息公示系统), run by the State Administration for Market Regulation. Search it with the supplier’s exact Chinese name or 18-digit Unified Social Credit Code and you get the real registration record — and if a company can’t be found there, it does not legally exist in mainland China. Everything else in this guide builds on that one test: pull the official record, then compare it against the license, contract, chop, and bank account the supplier shows you.
We run these checks in Chinese every week from our office in Zhengzhou, and foreign buyers who try it themselves hit the same three walls: the registry has no English version, the CAPTCHA needs Chinese reading skills, and the site often refuses overseas visitors outright. Here is the workflow that gets around all three.
GSXT charges nothing for basic queries, but search only works with the registered Chinese name or the code. The “English name” on a website or Alibaba profile has no legal status — it’s marketing text the company picked itself, and two different exporters can happily use the same one.
The interface is Chinese-only. Browser auto-translate handles the static text but breaks on the CAPTCHA, a puzzle that asks you to click Chinese characters in a given order. Access is the other problem: when we fetched gsxt.gov.cn from a US IP on 29 July 2026, the server returned HTTP 403 before showing a single page — which matches what foreign buyers report about the registry all the time. Three practical routes:
One caveat: several verification vendors say GSXT has required real-name login (Chinese ID plus Chinese mobile) for deeper layers like shareholder history since late 2021. We could not find an official SAMR notice confirming the scope or date, so treat the basic name search as open and check the official page before relying on anything deeper.
The Unified Social Credit Code (统一社会信用代码) has been China’s single company ID since 2015. Under national standard GB 32100-2015, position 1 shows the registering authority (9 = market regulation, which covers all normal companies), position 2 the entity type, positions 3–8 the county-level division code of the registration authority, positions 9–17 the old organization code, and position 18 a weighted mod-31 check character computed over the first 17 (see also the Baidu Baike entry).
Two checks need no Chinese at all. A manufacturer or trading company should have a code starting with 91; a code starting 92 belongs to an individual industrial and commercial household — a one-person sole trader, which deserves hard questions from anyone claiming a factory. And the character set excludes I, O, Z, S and V, so a code containing any of those is fake on sight.
A photo or PDF of a business license (营业执照) proves nothing by itself — image editing is not a high bar. Its value is as a source of fields you re-derive from GSXT and compare line by line. Licenses issued since 2015 also carry a QR code linking to the registry record; scanning it and comparing against the paper is the fastest authenticity check.
| Field | What to check |
|---|---|
| Chinese company name | The only legal name; must match GSXT character for character |
| Legal representative (法定代表人) | The person with statutory power to bind the company — is this who you’re dealing with? |
| Registered capital | Subscribed, not necessarily paid-in, since the 2014 reform; sanity-check against claimed scale |
| Business scope (经营范围) | Must cover what they claim to make, including import & export rights |
| Status | 存续/在营 (active) — not 注销 (deregistered) or 吊销 (license revoked) |
“Active” is not a clean bill. Companies land on the abnormal operations list (经营异常名录) for four things under the 2014 publicity regulations: missing the annual report (due 30 June each year), failing to disclose required information, fraudulent disclosures, or being unreachable at the registered address. A company can show as active and still sit on this list. The serious violations list (严重违法失信名单), governed by SAMR Order No. 44 since September 2021, keeps a company listed for at least three years — in our book, that listing ends the conversation at any price.
| Service | What you get | Price (checked July 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| ChinaCompanyLookup registry check | Status, legal rep, shareholders, capital; 24 h | US$69 |
| Sofeast bank account verification | Confirms the corporate account really belongs to the company | US$99 (+~US$50 bank fees for a USD test payment) |
| China Checkup Essential Verification | Registration, shareholders, directors, scope; 1 working day | US$129 |
| Full investigation (ChinaCompanyLookup, ChineseCheck) | Adds litigation, staff count, tax rating, analyst review | US$199 |
| On-site factory audit (SGS, BV, TÜV, QIMA) | Someone physically walks the factory | ~US$300–1,500 (intermediary quotes, not official price lists) |
The market shape is consistent: registry-data reports run US$69–199, analyst-reviewed reports US$199–399, and physical audits several hundred up. Against a first order of a few thousand dollars, the low end is cheap insurance.
The payment rule is simple: wire only to a corporate account (对公账户) whose name exactly matches the registered Chinese company name — never a personal account, never a different company, never an unexplained offshore account. One nuance from Sofeast: for SWIFT payments, Chinese banks issue an English account name that may not literally translate the Chinese one, so an English-name mismatch alone isn’t proof of fraud — verify through the bank or a small test payment rather than by eyeballing.
Chops matter more than signatures: in China the company chop (公章), carved by Public Security Bureau-designated engravers, is what binds a company. The round red chop on your contract must carry the exact registered name. Red flags: chop name differing from the license name, a “department” chop on a high-value contract, or entity A chopping the contract while entity B receives the money.
None of this needs a lawyer or a trip to China. For a typical first order, the whole check is an afternoon: license copy, GSXT lookup, blacklist check, bank-name match. And a supplier who resists a routine verification is telling you something useful too.
Related reading: Is Alibaba Legit? · China Sourcing Agents