The Official Chinese Sources for Company Data You Should Know

For readers who want to do this themselves, here are the authoritative Chinese government sources for each category of company information. All are operated by Chinese government bodies; all are in Chinese.

The seven sources you should know

What each source contains

GSXT (registration baseline)

Use for: Registration status, Unified Social Credit Code, legal representative, registered and paid-in capital, business scope, registered address, shareholders, branches, key personnel, annual reports, abnormal operations status.

This is the source of truth for everything on a Chinese Business License.

China Judgments Online (litigation history)

Use for: Past civil and commercial judgments where the company appeared as plaintiff or defendant. Searchable by company name and case number.

Coverage caveat: not every judgment is published. Sensitive cases, family cases, and certain administrative cases are excluded. The database is also subject to retroactive removals, so absence of a case does not prove no litigation.

Enforcement Information (dishonest debtor + execution)

Use for: Dishonest debtor list, persons subject to enforcement, consumption restriction orders, final cases, equity freezes via judicial assistance.

This is the most important source for ongoing risk. Every name on this site is associated with an unsatisfied judgment.

MOFCOM (foreign trade)

Use for: Confirming a Chinese company is registered to engage in import/export, and the declared English name on file. Useful as a cross-check against what the supplier claims.

Search is by Chinese name only. The system covers companies registered as foreign trade operators; smaller informal exporters may not appear.

CNIPA (intellectual property)

Use for: Trademark portfolio, patent portfolio (inventions, utility models, designs), software copyrights, works copyrights.

CNIPA has limited English search support. Free public access has rate limits and is sometimes intermittently slow from outside China.

MIIT ICP database (websites)

Use for: Linking a domain to a Chinese corporate beneficial owner. Confirming a supplier's claimed website is actually filed under their entity.

Only commercial websites operating from mainland China appear. Sites hosted abroad or running without ICP filings (technically illegal but common) are not in this database.

China Tax (compliance)

Use for: Limited public-facing tax compliance information. Most detailed tax records are not publicly accessible — verifying tax compliance requires the company's own tax certificate or licensed counsel.

Practical limitations of doing it yourself

If you are not based in China and do not read Chinese, the realistic limitations are:

Language

All systems are Chinese-only, with the partial exception of CNIPA's English-language interface (which covers IP search but not the underlying registration data).

Browser-translated GSXT pages are usable but produce odd renderings of legal terms (e.g., "经营状态" → "operating state" rather than "registration status").

CAPTCHA

Modern CAPTCHAs (especially GSXT's sliding puzzle) are difficult to automate and frustrate frequent users. Expect 10–30 seconds per CAPTCHA, sometimes with multiple retries. Heavy users may get temporarily blocked.

Geographic blocks

Some systems are slow or intermittently unreachable from outside China. Wenshu and zxgk are particularly prone to this. Many users report needing a Chinese VPN or DNS resolver to access reliably.

Cross-database keys

Each system uses its own search interface. Assembling a complete picture means manually rekeying the same company across six platforms — and remembering which Chinese name variant works in which system.

Aggregation

There is no government-provided "merged report" pulling data from all six systems. Commercial Chinese aggregators (Tianyancha, Qichacha, Qixinbao) do this internally for the Chinese market, but their interfaces remain in Chinese.

When DIY makes sense

DIY is reasonable if:

• You read Chinese fluently.
• You only verify one or two companies a year.
• You are not under time pressure.
• You don't need a documented PDF report for compliance / accounting / legal records.

When automation is the only economic path

Automation is the right choice if:

• You evaluate multiple suppliers per month.
• Your team doesn't read Chinese.
• You need an audit trail for compliance, insurance, or legal records.
• You need consistent translation of legal terminology (rather than ad-hoc Google Translate).

ChinaCheck pulls from the same authoritative source data and delivers a unified, translated PDF in English, Arabic, or Russian in under two minutes for basic checks, longer for full due diligence.

What's next

You have the sources. The next question is: in what order, and to what depth, should you check them for a given transaction? Continue to the 10-Point Verification Checklist.