What the Chinese company registry shows, and how to read it

Registered capital is a promise, not money

Registered capital (注册资本) is the amount the shareholders undertook to contribute. From 2014 until mid-2024 it did not have to be paid on any timetable, and for a great many companies it never was. The revised Company Law in force since 1 July 2024 changed that: shareholders of a limited company must pay their subscribed capital in full within five years of registration, and companies registered earlier must bring their schedule within that limit by 30 June 2027. A supplier quoting "10 million RMB registered capital" may still hold nothing today — but it now owes that money on a deadline.

The deadline has a visible side effect. Many companies are cutting their registered capital rather than paying it in, and a sharp reduction (减资) in the record is worth a question: it usually means the shareholders could not, or would not, fund what they had promised.

The field that matters is paid-in capital (实收资本) — what actually arrived. A company with 10m registered and 0 paid-in is not a fraud; it is extremely common, and for a company registered after July 2024 it may simply be early in its five-year window. But it tells you the shareholders have not put their own money at risk, which is worth knowing before you wire a deposit.

Read the two together, and read them against the size of your order. A company with 500,000 RMB paid in taking a 2m RMB order is being financed by your deposit.

Registered capital is what they said. Paid-in capital is what they did.

Business scope is the field that answers the factory question

The business scope (经营范围) is the legal statement of what the company may do, and it is the one place where "are they a factory" has an answer rather than an opinion. Manufacturing scope contains 生产 or 制造; trading scope reads 批发, 零售 or 贸易.

Scope also shows what a company is licensed for beyond your product. A supplier whose scope covers food contact materials, or hazardous chemicals, or medical devices, holds those permissions because a regulator granted them — which is a stronger signal than a certificate emailed as a JPEG.

And it shows the reverse. If your product needs a production licence the supplier does not hold, either somebody else is making it or somebody is operating outside their scope.

The fields that actually predict trouble

Court judgments (裁判文书) name the company as plaintiff or defendant. A manufacturer of any age has some — commercial disputes are normal. The pattern matters more than the count: repeated unpaid-supplier cases mean a company that does not pay its own vendors, and a company that does not pay its vendors will not hold your production schedule.

The dishonest-debtor list (失信被执行人), often translated as the enforcement blacklist, is a court finding that a judgment went unpaid. It is the single strongest negative signal in the record, and it is binary.

Abnormal operations (经营异常) means the company failed to file an annual report or could not be reached at its registered address. Sometimes it is administrative sloppiness. Sometimes the address is empty.

Status (存续 or 在业 versus 注销 or 吊销) tells you whether the company legally exists today. Dissolved and revoked companies keep trading for a surprisingly long time.

One lawsuit is a business. A pattern of unpaid judgments is a warning.

What the registry cannot tell you

It says nothing about product quality, and nothing about whether the plant is any good. A company can be spotless on paper and run a bad line.

It says nothing about capacity. Scope permits an activity; it does not measure it.

And it is a snapshot. A record pulled six months ago has aged — judgments and enforcement listings appear continuously.

Doing it yourself

The official source is the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (国家企业信用信息公示系统). It is free, it is authoritative, and a basic search needs no account — only Chinese and a captcha.

Commercial mirrors such as Qichacha and Tianyancha are easier to read, but since 2023 they have restricted access from outside mainland China, and signing up generally requires a mainland (+86) phone number. For a buyer abroad the official system is now the more reachable of the two. The mirrors also lag the official record and their English translations flatten exactly the legal distinctions that carry the meaning — scope wording in particular.

What you need in order to search is the unified social credit code (统一社会信用代码), an 18-character string on the business licence. Searching by English name will not find a Chinese company: the English name is marketing and has no legal existence.

Ask for the licence first. Without the credit code there is nothing to look up.