China Company Register: How to Search GSXT & Verify a USCC

China’s company register is the most generous in this series. GSXT — the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System — publishes, free, what other countries sell or never record: shareholders with their subscribed and paid-in capital, administrative penalties, operating-anomaly and serious-violation blacklists, and mandatory annual reports, for every registered company in the mainland.

The wall is not price. It is language — the system is Chinese-only, with no official English version; access — the commercial platforms the world used to reach this data have been closed to users outside the mainland since 2023; and a ceiling — the financial fields in those annual reports are optional and usually blank, and since November 2024 every company’s beneficial owners are filed with the central bank in a system the public cannot read.

This guide covers the one code that unlocks everything, what GSXT shows and hides, the sealed BO layer, the free integrity lists that make China unusually screenable, and the narrowing door for anyone working from outside.

One code: the USCC

Since 2015 every registered entity in mainland China carries one identifier for everything: the 18-character Unified Social Credit Code (USCC). It is the registration number, the tax number, and the key that joins GSXT, customs, the courts and every licence database. It appears on the business licence, on contracts, on VAT invoices — and verifying it is free.

Registration itself is layered — licences are issued by city and district market-regulation bureaus under SAMR, the super-regulator formed in 2018 — but everything feeds one national system, and one code addresses it. For how the USCC compares with identifiers worldwide, see our global tax-ID format guide.

What is free — and what is walled

GSXT (gsxt.gov.cn) is free, and no account is needed for a basic search. For a registered company it discloses the USCC, legal representative, registered capital, business scope, address and status; its shareholders with subscribed and paid-in capital; its annual reports; administrative penalties; and whether it sits on the operating-anomaly or serious-violation lists. By the standards of this series, that free tier is extraordinary — it includes data Australia prices, Japan never records, and Singapore certifies for S$5.50.

Set against the series: this is Brazil’s free-and-open model at ten times the scale — with Japan’s inverse problem. Japan sells a register with no owners in it; China gives away a register full of owners, in a language and through interfaces built for a domestic audience. See our Japan and Brazil guides for the two poles China sits between.

How many companies exist

SAMR’s own portal puts the register at more than 190 million market entities — a figure that includes companies, farmer cooperatives and, as the majority, individual industrial and commercial households (getihu), the sole-trader form counted in the tens of millions. Companies proper number in the tens of millions; the getihu are the register’s long tail. Every one of them carries a USCC and a GSXT page.

The entity types you will meet

Financials: listed companies

For listed companies, China is conventionally transparent. Audited annual and interim reports, prospectuses and announcements are free on cninfo — the CSRC-designated disclosure platform — and on the Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing exchange sites. Disclosure is in Chinese, with major companies often publishing English versions. Thousands of listed companies sit in this tier — and, as everywhere in this series, they are the exception that proves the rule.

Financials: private companies

Every company must file an annual report through GSXT — and here China made a precise choice. The report’s registration facts are public: shareholders and their capital contributions, equity transfers, contact details, website. The financial fields — total assets, revenue, profit, tax paid — are filed with the report, but the company chooses whether to publish them, and most choose not to. The result is a register that will tell you who owns a private company and stay silent on what it earns.

Failing to file at all has consequences: a company that skips its annual report lands on the operating-anomaly list, publicly, and stays there until it cures — a flag lenders and counterparties check. So the reporting system is enforced; only the numbers inside it are discretionary. For private-company financials, the practical sources are the company itself, its bank, or licensed Chinese credit platforms — none of which is a public record.

Shareholders: the open layer

This is where China outshines every other country in this series. GSXT names a company’s shareholders — individuals and entities — with their subscribed and paid-in capital, updated through registration changes and annual reports. Corporate shareholders carry their own USCC, so a domestic chain can be walked upward, company by company, entirely free. Brazil charges nothing but shows only the partner list; Singapore charges S$5.50; Australia charges A$9; Japan records nothing. China publishes it all.

The open shareholder layer has a strategic bonus: state ownership is visible. Walk a shareholder chain upward and a state-owned enterprise resolves, in the register itself, to its state holder — SASAC or another government body — which makes SOE identification a registry fact rather than a guess. For sanctions, procurement and FOCI-style screening, that is a check most countries cannot offer from public records.

Two caveats keep the celebration honest. Registered capital figures are subscribed commitments, not proof of paid-in funds — the paid-in column matters, and even it reflects filings rather than audited fact. And a name on the shareholder register is a legal holder, not necessarily the real one: nominee arrangements are common enough that the state built an entire sealed system to look behind them — which is the next section.

UBO access: filed and sealed

Since 1 November 2024, China has run a true beneficial-ownership filing system. Under the Administrative Measures on Beneficial Owner Information, issued jointly by the People’s Bank of China and SAMR, every company, partnership and foreign-company branch must file its beneficial owners — natural persons with more than 25% of equity, profit rights or voting rights, or actual control — through the registration system to the PBOC. New entities file at incorporation; entities existing before the rules had until 1 November 2025, a deadline that has now passed. A narrow exemption covers small companies (registered capital up to RMB 10 million) owned entirely by natural persons with no other control arrangements.

And none of it is public. The BO database sits with the central bank, readable by authorities and by AML-obligated financial institutions performing their statutory duties. A foreign compliance team has no route to it. The design is deliberate and now familiar from this series: like Singapore’s RORC, China’s answer to the UBO question is the state knows; you don’t — layered, in China’s case, on top of the world’s most open shareholder register. For the global picture, see our guide to beneficial-ownership registers worldwide.

Compliance and integrity signals

China’s free red-flag layer is the deepest in this series, because publicity is the enforcement mechanism. On GSXT itself: administrative penalties from market regulators; the operating-anomaly list (missed annual reports, unreachable registered address); and the serious-violation list for graver offences. A clean GSXT page is a meaningful signal precisely because a dirty one is so visible.

The courts add the list every Chinese counterparty fears: the Supreme People’s Court’s dishonest judgment debtors (shixin) register — companies and individuals who have defied enforceable judgments, searchable free, with real consequences attached inside China. Enforcement-case records sit alongside it. The tax administration publishes major tax-violation cases and, at the other pole, its A-grade taxpayer lists — violation-out, honour-in. Sector licences (banking, insurance, securities, food, pharma) are checkable with their regulators. The one caveat: written court judgments, once published at scale, have become far more selective since 2021 — the lists above remain, but the underlying documents are thinner than they were.

Two pieces of Chinese legal practice turn this data into verification. First, the person and the seal. The legal representative named on GSXT is the individual with statutory power to bind the company — and Chinese contracts bind through the company chop, the registered official seal, not through signatures. Practical verification is therefore a three-way match: the person you are dealing with is the registered legal representative (or holds authority traceable to them), the chop on the contract carries the company’s exact Chinese legal name, and both match the GSXT record. A deal executed by the wrong person with the wrong seal may simply not bind the company.

Second, read the status field like a lawyer. A deregistered company has been liquidated and is dead. A company whose licence has been revoked still legally exists — it just cannot lawfully operate, and it may never have been liquidated. Revoked-but-surviving shells can still wave a business licence at you, which is why the distinction is a classic fraud vector. In the same spirit, business scope is not decorative: a Chinese company operating outside its registered scope may face licensing consequences, so a supplier whose invoices do not match its scope is a screening signal, not a curiosity.

Finally, China now runs its own sanctions layer, and it belongs in a screening workflow. MOFCOM publishes the Unreliable Entity List and the Export Control List of dual-use items on its website — and the prohibitions cut both ways: listed foreign entities are barred from China-related trade and investment, and Chinese organisations are barred from transacting with them, including transmitting data to them. The lists were used sparingly for years, then heavily through 2025, with some designations later suspended as trade talks moved — so the operative rule is to check the live MOFCOM list, not a cached copy, on both your counterparty and yourself.

The narrowing door

Everything above describes what China publishes. What changed is who can practically reach it. In 2023, the major commercial data platforms — Wind, Qichacha, Tianyancha — cut off or restricted their corporate-registry databases for users outside the mainland, in the same period that China tightened cross-border data rules and raided foreign due-diligence firms. Registration on the platforms requires a mainland +86 mobile number with real-name verification. The workflow the world’s compliance teams had quietly relied on — an English-adjacent aggregator wrapped around GSXT — stopped working from abroad.

GSXT itself remains open to anyone — free, no account for basic search — but it is built for a domestic user: Chinese-only, CAPTCHA-gated, searchable by exact legal name or USCC, with no API and no bulk files. The practical consequence for a foreign team is a choice between building mainland-side capability, working through licensed intermediaries, or using a provider that maintains lawful access and does the structuring. That is the door this article is named for.

The corporate linkage gap

Chinese corporate structure has a signature complication: the entities that matter most internationally are often not the Chinese company you can see. Offshore holding companies in the Cayman Islands, BVI and Hong Kong own the mainland operating companies; VIE structures control them by contract rather than equity, so the listed vehicle foreign investors hold may own nothing GSXT can show; nominee shareholders hold what others control. GSXT describes the mainland node with unusual richness — and stops at the border.

One boundary question comes first, though: is your counterparty actually a mainland company at all? A large share of “Chinese” counterparties in international trade are Hong Kong entities — incorporated at Hong Kong’s Companies Registry, a separate system with its own rules, bilingual records and no USCC. Nothing in this guide applies to them. The first check on any Chinese-sounding counterparty is which register it actually lives in: a mainland USCC, a Hong Kong company number, or an offshore incorporation wearing a Chinese trading name.

What’s changing

• The BO system is in its enforcement phase. The 1 November 2025 filing deadline for pre-existing entities has passed; the new AML Law has applied since 1 January 2025; penalties for non-filing run to RMB 50,000 — and the data stays sealed.
• Registration administration was overhauled. SAMR Order No. 95, effective 10 February 2025, standardises company registration nationwide — including, for the first time, dormant-status filings.
• Offshore access keeps tightening, not loosening. The 2023 platform cut-off has not been reversed; cross-border data-transfer rules continue to shape what any provider can lawfully move out of the mainland.
• Judgment publication remains selective. The court lists stay public, but the era of bulk-readable judgments has not returned.

How to access Chinese data at scale

One company at a time, from anywhere: GSXT, free, in Chinese, by exact name or USCC. At scale, there is no official bulk file or API — the aggregation layer that solved this is now mainland-only, and cross-border data rules govern what can lawfully leave. Scale therefore means licensed, lawful pipelines and a provider that maintains them — with the caveats in the next two sections stated up front. For how registry access compares country by country, see our business-registry API map and the primer on why registry provenance matters.

SAMR’s GSXT vs Global Database

The honest framing: for a single Chinese company, if you read Chinese and can work the portal, GSXT is authoritative, free and remarkably complete. Where a registry-grounded layer earns its place is everything around that sentence’s conditions — English, scale, the offshore structure, and the layers no public Chinese source holds.

Limitations of Chinese company data

A due-diligence file on a Chinese counterparty should record the ceilings of every source — the register’s, and ours.

Registered capital is a commitment, not cash. Subscribed capital figures on GSXT are what shareholders promised, on a timetable that can run years; even paid-in figures reflect filings rather than audited verification. A company advertising RMB 50 million in registered capital may hold a fraction of it.

Shareholders of record are not always the owners in fact. Nominee holding is common, and the state’s own response — the sealed BO filing system — is precisely an admission that the public register does not answer the control question. Treat GSXT ownership as the legal layer; treat any claim about the person behind it as reported unless a filing somewhere in the chain proves it.

The financials are not there. For the unlisted majority, no public Chinese source carries reliable revenue or asset figures; annual-report financial fields are optional and usually withheld. Numbers circulating on commercial platforms are self-reported or estimated — useful context, not provenance-grade data.

The name problem is severe. Only the Chinese legal name is official. English names are marketing translations, unregistered and non-unique; romanisation collides constantly at 190-million-entity scale. Matching without a USCC is guesswork; the USCC is the only safe join key.

Access is lawful-route-dependent. Cross-border data rules constrain what any provider can move out of the mainland, and the constraint is live and evolving. A provider that promises unrestricted, real-time, bulk Chinese data from abroad is describing a pipeline you should ask hard questions about.

What that means for what we can promise. For China, Global Database provides registry-sourced identity, status, shareholders and penalty signals with a source and timestamp on every field; listed-company financials from official disclosure platforms; and group linkage through Hong Kong and offshore registries where the chain actually surfaces there. Where the mainland record is silent — a private company’s revenue, a sealed beneficial owner — the field is empty and marked as such, not modelled. A limitation by design, and, for a compliance file, the point.

What the records won’t tell you

Frequently asked questions