A Chinese company's core identity is public and free to look up. Everything a sanctions check needs is a separate, also-public name list. What is not public is where most of the useful internal facts live, which is why a verification is about matching records to each other rather than about gaining access to anything hidden.
The National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System is the official registry, run by the market regulation authority. It publishes the registration itself: legal name, unified social credit code, entity type, registered address, legal representative, registered capital, establishment date, business scope and registration status.
It also carries the annual reporting a company is required to file, and public entries such as registration changes. Two practical notes: the system asks a human to pass a challenge, and it is written in Chinese, so the Chinese legal name is what you need in hand before you start.
Away from the registry, the customs authority maintains an enterprise credit platform for companies registered to import and export, and the national intellectual property administration publishes trademark and patent records. Both are useful for a specific question, neither replaces the registry.
The sanctions and export-control lists sit in a different category. OFAC, the UK and EU consolidated lists, the UN Security Council list and the US BIS lists are published in full. They are public; what they are not is searchable by identity. They contain names, aliases, dates of birth and addresses, and your job is to decide whether the name in front of you belongs to one of them. You can run that search yourself on our free check.
Internal accounts, bank balances, private contracts, customer lists and the flow of money are not published anywhere, and no public-record process reaches them. Anyone who tells you they can see a bank balance or a private agreement from public sources is describing something that does not exist.
Ownership deserves a specific caution. What the registry shows about shareholders is a registration record, not a full picture of who ultimately controls a company across layers of entities and jurisdictions. A record can be complete for the entity and still not answer the beneficial-ownership question.
| Question | Where it is answered | Public | Repeatable by you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Does this company exist, and is it active | National registry | Yes, free | Yes |
| What is it registered to do | National registry, business scope | Yes, free | Yes |
| Who is the legal representative | National registry | Yes, free | Yes |
| Who owns it | National registry, shareholder record | Partly, and layered structures are only partly visible | Yes |
| Is the name on a sanctions or export-control list | OFAC, UK, EU, UN, BIS published lists | Yes, the lists are public | Yes, with an alias search |
| Is it registered to import and export | Customs enterprise credit platform | Yes | Yes |
| Does it hold trademarks or patents | National IP administration | Yes | Yes |
| Its bank balance, contracts, customers, cash flow | Nowhere | No | No |
For identity, mostly. What it does not do is tell you whether the account you are paying belongs to the entity on the invoice, or whether the name appears on a sanctions list. Those are two further checks, and both are worth the few minutes.
The registry is in Chinese, including the legal name and the business scope, and machine translation of a scope clause is not reliable for deciding whether your product is covered. That is one of the reasons buyers ask somebody to read the entry rather than run it through a translator.
A registered company appears in the registry, and you can search it by name or by its code. A seller who cannot be found there is not a registered Chinese company, which is a different situation from a company trying to stay private.