China Company Register: How to Search the GSXT and Verify Chinese Companies (2026)

1. What is the Chinese company register?

China does not keep its register in one court or one chamber of commerce. Companies register with a local market supervision administration, and the Alibaba record in this guide names its registration authority as the Hangzhou High-tech Industrial Development Zone (Binjiang) Market Supervision Administration. What every authority registers is then published nationally through the 国家企业信用信息公示系统, the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System, at www.gsxt.gov.cn. Shanghai, for example, has its own sub-site under the same name at sh.gsxt.gov.cn.

Two State Council regulations set most of the rules. The Regulations on the Administration of Registration of Market Entities, in force since 1 March 2022, decide who registers and what: companies, non-company enterprise legal persons, sole proprietorship enterprises, partnerships, farmers' cooperatives, individual businesses, and branches of foreign companies. The Interim Regulations on Enterprise Information Disclosure of 2014, revised with effect from 1 May 2024, decide what gets published and by whom. The result is a register that publishes three kinds of information side by side.

In short: the business licence information tells you a company exists and who represents it, the annual report tells you how to reach it and who paid in what, and the lists tell you whether a regulator has flagged it.

2. How to search GSXT step by step

Searching is free and we needed no account to open a company record. Two things stand in the way instead. The register is in Chinese, so you read it through your browser's translation, which is how both screenshots below were made. And you have to solve a CAPTCHA before results appear, which we did by hand.

1. Open GSXT and use the single search box

   The box on www.gsxt.gov.cn takes a company name, a Unified Social Credit Code, or a registration number. Turn on your browser's translation if you do not read Chinese. Registered company names must be written in standard Chinese characters, so a search in Chinese characters or by code is the reliable route.

2. Search by code when you have one

   An 18-character code points at exactly one entity in the whole country, so it saves you the result list and the filtering. Ask a Chinese counterparty for it first: it is printed on the business licence, it heads the business licence information on GSXT, and it doubles as the tax number.

3. Solve the CAPTCHA

   Results only load after a CAPTCHA, which we solved by hand. It also makes GSXT impractical for checking more than a handful of companies.

4. Narrow the result list

   A name search can return a long list. Our search for Alibaba returned more than 100 results and a request to enter more precise search criteria. Each hit shows the name, a status badge, the code, the legal representative, the date of establishment, and a Registration Number field. Use the filters above the list to cut it down by status, years since establishment, registration authority by province, or licensing and penalty records, or switch the search to the abnormal operations list or the serious violators list.

   

5. Open the company record

   The record opens on the business licence information: code, name, type, legal representative, registered capital, date of establishment, approval date, registration authority, registration status, domicile, and the business scope written out in full. None of it is behind a paywall.

   

6. Work through the other sections

   The table of contents on the left of the record lists the further sections: administrative licensing information, and information on illegal and dishonest activities. Use Expand all to open them. The law also requires the annual report to be published through this system, although no annual report section is visible in the part of the record we captured.

3. What data is public and what it costs

Searching the Chinese register and opening a company record costs nothing. The price is paid in effort instead: a CAPTCHA, a foreign language, and one company at a time. What makes China unusual is less the price than what the law forces companies to publish, and what it lets them keep back.

Two things are worth pulling out of that table. The annual report must publish the company's postal address, phone number, and email address, along with what each shareholder subscribed and actually paid in. And the financial part of the report is ten figures, not a set of accounts: employees, total assets, total liabilities, guarantees given, owners' equity, total revenue, main business revenue, total profit, net profit, and total tax. Each company decides whether the public sees them.

What the GSXT annual report does not ask for: a set of financial statements. Every company draws up annual financial reports, but a limited liability company only has to send them to its shareholders, and only joint stock companies that offer shares to the public must publish theirs. What the business licence information does not show: an industry code. Activity is described in the business scope, a list of business items written out as text. And the record itself is in Chinese.

4. Chinese legal forms, briefly

The entity type is a registered item in its own right, written out in the type field of the record. Since 1 January 2020 the organisational form of a foreign-invested enterprise follows the Company Law and the Partnership Enterprise Law, and the three old foreign-investment enterprise laws were repealed on that date.

The type field often says more than the form. Alibaba's record reads, in translation, "Limited Liability Company (Invested by Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, Not Solely Owned)", so the origin of the investment is part of the type. Limited liability companies registered by 30 June 2024 whose remaining contribution period runs more than five years from 1 July 2027 must bring it within five years by 30 June 2027, so expect contribution details on older records to change.

5. How to verify a Chinese company: a practical checklist

1. Confirm the code and the registration status

   Search the 18-character code on GSXT and check that the Chinese name, type, legal representative, and domicile match what you were given. Then read the status: a company can be live, suspended (歇业, for up to three years), revoked, or deregistered. For a quick first pass, our free company lookup finds the registration and revenue data in one search.

2. Check the code itself

   A valid code has 18 characters, all digits or capital letters. Every Chinese document from the same company should carry the same code, because it never changes while the entity exists. A different code means a different entity: an organisation that is deregistered and set up again in a new form gets a new one.

3. Check who represents the company

   The legal representative is a registered item and appears on the record free. If the person signing your contract is someone else, ask for a written authorisation from the company and check it against the record.

4. Check the two lists

   Look the company up on the list of businesses with abnormal operations and the list of serious violators. A company that does not publish its annual report on time goes on the abnormal operations list, and one that has missed two years in a row, has not put it right, and cannot be reached at its registered address has its business licence revoked.

5. Read the latest annual report

   Check the phone number, email address, and website against what you were given, compare subscribed with paid-in contributions, and note whether the company published its financial figures at all. A company that keeps revenue and profit private is within its rights, but you will need the figures from the company itself.

6. Review licences and penalties

   Open the administrative licensing and penalty sections. The rules require both to be published within 20 working days, so a recent penalty should already be there, and a regulated activity in the business scope without a matching licence is worth a question.

6. Limitations of the official register

To be clear: GSXT publishes a lot about each company, contact details included, and searching it costs nothing. The limits are about access and scale:

• A CAPTCHA before results. Searching requires solving one, which we had to do by hand to make this guide's screenshots. That rules out anything automated.
• In Chinese. Browser translation makes records readable, but status labels come out in different wordings and registered names turn into unofficial English ones.
• Financial figures are optional. Revenue, profit, assets, employee numbers, and tax paid appear only when the company chooses to publish them.
• No accounts, only ten figures. Even a company that publishes everything shows headline numbers in its annual report, not a balance sheet or income statement.
• A year behind by design. Annual reports cover the previous year and are due by 30 June, so the financial figures always describe the year before.
• No industry code. The business scope is a list of activities written out as text, and the search filters we captured have no sector option, so you cannot filter companies by industry on GSXT.
• One company at a time. The screens we captured offer no bulk export and no API. A broad name search for Alibaba returned more than 100 hits and a request for more precise criteria.

If you check one Chinese supplier a quarter, none of this matters. If you onboard hundreds, it is the whole problem.

7. Access GSXT data programmatically

CompanyData maintains a normalized database of all 80,839,200 Chinese entities, sourced from the official Chinese registration records and refreshed as changes appear. Unified Social Credit Codes are already validated, and records are enriched with revenue and employee figures, which Chinese companies may choose not to publish, and with industry codes, which the business licence information does not carry.

Our Company Data API lets you look up any Chinese entity by Unified Social Credit Code, name, or address and get structured JSON back in real time, with 150 free lookups to start and no CAPTCHA. It is used by developers, banks, and insurers across 190+ countries, so Chinese checks work exactly like checks anywhere else.

GET /v1/companies?country=CN&registration_id=91330100716105852F

{
  "name": "Alibaba (China) Network Technology Co., Ltd.",
  "legal_form": "Limited Liability Company",
  "registration_id": "91330100716105852F",
  "city": "Hangzhou",
  "status": "continued",
  "legal_representative": "Jiang Fang",
  "start_date": "1999-09-09"
}

Every field above is what the GSXT record shows, in the English of the browser translation used for our screenshots. The register itself holds them in Chinese. Revenue, employees, and industry codes come back on the same record where we hold them, and are absent here because the business licence information on GSXT does not contain them: revenue and employees sit in the annual report, where each company decides whether to publish them.

8. China vs other company registers

China makes every company publish its contact details each year, leaves its financial figures optional, and puts a CAPTCHA in front of all of it. For context: