How do you actually check a Chinese business license yourself?

Every legally operating Chinese company has a registration record in a public government registry, and checking it costs nothing and takes only a few minutes — a step skipped far more often than it should be, given how easy it actually is.

Where to check

China’s National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System is the official public registry for company registration records, searchable by company name or by the company’s unified social credit code — the standardised registration number that appears on business licenses and, often, on invoices.

What to actually check once you’re in

• Registered name matches exactly. A near-match with a slightly different name is worth a direct question, not an assumption of a typo.
• Registered scope (经营范围). This is where you confirm whether manufacturing is actually part of what the company is licensed to do, versus a scope limited to wholesale or trading — directly relevant to telling a real factory from a reseller.
• Registration status. A status other than active or normal — revoked, or flagged as abnormal — is a serious warning sign worth stopping on immediately.
• Registration date. A very recently registered company isn’t automatically a problem, but it’s a data point worth weighing against claims of years of manufacturing history.
• Registered capital. A registered capital figure far out of proportion to a company’s claimed production scale is a soft signal worth combining with other checks, not a standalone red flag on its own.

What a clean result doesn’t tell you

A legitimate, active registration confirms the company legally exists and gives you its registered scope — it doesn’t confirm product quality, delivery reliability, or that the company genuinely operates the specific production capacity it describes to you at the booth. Registry verification and the checks on spotting a trading company posing as a factory are complementary, not substitutes for each other.

If the language barrier is a real obstacle

A browser translation tool or a translation app pointed at a screenshot handles the registry’s Chinese-language interface reasonably well for the fields above. For an order large enough that getting this wrong would be expensive, having someone who reads Chinese confirm the key details directly removes the risk of a translation tool missing a subtlety in the wording.

What’s next

Read the fuller supplier-verification checklist, which places this check alongside the other steps worth taking before committing to a larger order.