Chinese business licence lookup — where to check one, and what you get

The awkward part of “looking up” a Chinese company is not finding a database. There are several. It is that the databases answer a narrower question than the one you are asking.

A lookup tells you the entity is registered. It does not tell you that the entity is a factory, that the factory is at the address you were given, or that the person emailing you works there. Buyers consistently over-read the first answer as if it were the second.

The three routes, and what each is for

1. The official registry — free. The National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System is run by the market regulator and covers every registered entity in mainland China. Search by company name or by the 18-character unified social credit code. You get the filing as filed: name, code, legal representative, registered capital, establishment date, business scope, and whether the entity is still active. It is authoritative and it is free. It is also entirely in Chinese, and it will fight you if you try to automate it.

2. A commercial aggregator — fast, and worth it. Services that index the same filings add the things the official system does not surface comfortably: shareholder structure, branch relationships, insured employee counts from annual reports, litigation, and an English interface. For a one-off check on a single supplier, this is usually the cheaper use of your afternoon.

3. The document itself — the only one that links identity to a person. All of the above is registry data. None of it tells you whether the licence in the PDF you were sent belongs to the entity you are paying. That requires the licence as an object: photographed where it hangs on the wall, with the room and the sign outside in frame.

Which field to read first

Not the name. The business scope (经营范围). Chinese practice uses a standard vocabulary, so the field actually reads: entities that manufacture carry wording built on 生产, 制造 or 加工, while trading entities carry 销售, 批发 or 零售. If the company presented to you as a factory is registered for wholesale, you have found the question worth asking.

The second field is the establishment date, because it is the cheapest check on a story. A company registered eighteen months ago may still be run by people with twenty years in the industry — but any claim attached to “our company history” now needs a follow-up question.

What a lookup will never tell you

• Whether production happens at the registered address, which is often a filing address
• Whether the entity owns the building, the machines, or the stock
• Whether it is financially healthy
• Whether the goods it ships are made by it or bought in
• Whether the person you are talking to is authorised to bind it

The last one is where most disputes actually live, and no registry on earth records it.

If you only do one thing

Take the Chinese name from the licence, look it up in the official registry, and read the business scope. That single step separates the two cases that matter — a manufacturer and a trading company presenting itself as one — before any money moves.

If it comes back as a trading entity, that is not a verdict. It is the start of the right conversation, and the paragraph above tells you which questions to ask next.

Last checked 2026-10