How to Read a Chinese Business License: Every Field Explained

A Chinese business license — the single document that proves a company legally exists. It is one page. It is dense with terminology most foreign buyers cannot read. And almost every field on it is a data point you can use to decide whether to send money to the company named on it.

Most guides translate the fields and stop there. That is the easy half. The harder half is knowing which fields actually predict behaviour, which ones are inflated by design, and how to check that the document in front of you is not a photoshopped PDF. This guide covers all three — including the check-digit formula from China's national standard, which lets you validate a license arithmetically instead of trusting the file.

What the License Actually Is

The license is printed in Chinese. This guide names each field in English and tells you which figure to read; on a scan, a translation app or your contact can point you to the field.

China used to issue several separate documents: a business license, an organization code certificate, and a tax registration certificate. Those were merged into a single certificate, and later rounds folded social insurance and statistics registration into the same document. The practical result for a buyer is simple: there is one page, and one number. If someone sends you a “tax registration certificate” as a separate document, it is either old or fabricated.

Two versions exist. The original is the large format meant to be framed and displayed at the place of business. The copy is the smaller format used for carrying and submitting with applications. They carry identical legal effect. Suppliers almost always send a scan of the copy, which is normal.

China also issues an electronic business license, which the market regulation authority treats as equivalent to the paper version. An electronic license is not a red flag by itself — but an electronic license that cannot be matched to a live record on the national registry is.

Field 1: The 18-Digit Unified Social Credit Code

The Unified Social Credit Code, USCC is the most useful field on the page, because it is a structured code rather than an arbitrary number. It follows the Chinese national standard GB 32100-2015, which is publicly published, so you can decode it without any proprietary tool.

The 18 characters are drawn from the digits 0–9 and uppercase letters, but the standard deliberately excludes five letters — I, O, Z, S and V — because they are easily confused with 1, 0, 2, 5 and U. If a code you were given contains any of those five letters, it is invalid on its face.

The first two digits are worth memorizing, because they settle a question buyers ask constantly. 91 means a company registered with the market regulation authority — a limited liability company or similar. 92 means an individual business, which is not a company at all: it has no shareholders, no board, and its owner carries unlimited personal liability. A supplier that presents itself as a factory but holds a 92 code is usually a trading desk or a workshop run as a sole proprietorship. That is not automatically disqualifying, but it changes who you are actually contracting with, and it changes what you can recover if things go wrong.

How to Validate the Check Digit by Hand

The 18th character is not random. It is computed from the first 17 using a weighted modulo-31 formula defined in GB 32100-2015. This means you can verify a code arithmetically — without any database, API or subscription — which is the single cheapest forgery check available to you.

First, convert each character to a numeric value: digits keep their value, and letters map as follows.

Then multiply each of the first 17 values by its position weight.

Then apply the formula: C₁₈ = 31 − (sum of the 17 products mod 31). Two special cases apply. If the remainder is 0, the result would be 31, and the standard substitutes the character 0. If the remainder is 1, the result would be 30, which maps to the letter Y.

The standard includes a worked example, which is the cleanest way to confirm you have implemented it correctly. Take the first 17 characters 91350100M000100Y4:

1. The weighted sum of all 17 products is 1,640.
2. 1,640 divided by 31 leaves a remainder of 28.
3. 31 − 28 = 3.
4. Value 3 maps to the character 3, so the complete code is 91350100M000100Y43.

Field 2: Company Name

Chinese company names follow a fixed four-part structure: administrative division + trade name + industry description + organizational form. A name like Shenzhen Huaxing Precision Hardware Co., Ltd. reads as Shenzhen (city) + Huaxing (trade name) + precision hardware (industry) + limited company (form).

This structure is diagnostic. A name that omits the industry or organizational form, or that ends in words meaning trading firm, trading office or shop, is usually not a limited company. It is an individual business or a small partnership — a materially different counterparty from the one the supplier's website implies.

One correction that matters for contracts: the Chinese name is the legal name. The English name a supplier uses on its website, invoices and email signature is a trading convenience and has no registration status. If you draft a contract against an English name that does not map to a registered Chinese entity, you may find you have contracted with nothing at all. Always take the registered Chinese name from the license, and use it in the contract alongside the USCC.

Field 3: Company Type

The company type field states the legal form and, in brackets, who owns it. The bracketed part is the one buyers skim past and later regret. Common forms include:

Two practical consequences. First, unlimited liability cuts both ways: it means the owner is personally exposed, which can help enforcement, but it also usually means a thinner balance sheet and no shareholders to pursue. Second, if the type says wholly owned by a legal person, the entity on the license is a subsidiary, and the party with real assets and real decision-making may sit one or two levels above it. That is where an ownership trace begins — see our guide to who really owns a Chinese supplier, which walks through the chain step by step. The shareholder structure on the national registry is the starting point, and our registry guide shows where to find it.

Note that the exact wording of this field has changed over time as registration rules were revised, so licenses issued in different years may phrase the same structure differently. Read the substance, not the label.

Field 4: Legal Representative

The legal representative is the natural person with statutory authority to bind the company. When you sign a contract, this is the person whose signature and chop make it enforceable against the company.

The legal representative is not necessarily the owner, and not necessarily the person you have been talking to. In Chinese SMEs it is frequently the founder, but it can also be a hired manager, a family member, or — in less careful arrangements — a nominee. A supplier's sales contact has no authority to bind the company unless the legal representative has delegated it in writing.

The legal representative field is also one of the strongest historical signals available. Search the name against the registry and see what else that person is attached to. A legal representative who has been attached to several companies that were later revoked or struck off, or who appears on enforcement records, is a pattern rather than a coincidence. We cover this specific signal in red flags when verifying Chinese suppliers.

Field 5: Registered Capital

This is the most misunderstood field on the license, and the one most often used to impress foreign buyers.

Registered capital is the amount shareholders have committed to contribute. It is not money in a bank account. Paid-in capital is what has actually been paid. On many licenses only the subscribed figure appears, which is why the paid-in number has to come from the annual report filings on the national registry.

The rules changed significantly, and the change matters when you are reading a license issued before 2024. Under the revised Company Law that took effect on 1 July 2024, shareholders of a limited liability company must pay in their subscribed capital within five years of establishment. Companies registered before that date were given a transition window: by 30 June 2027 they must adjust any remaining subscription period that would run beyond five years from 1 July 2027 down to within five years, and the capital must be fully paid by 30 June 2032.

Read the two numbers together, and read them against the annual report. A company whose paid-in capital has been unchanged for years while its employee count falls is contracting, whatever its website says.

Field 6: Establishment Date and Business Term

Date of establishment is the company's age. A company registered less than twelve months ago has no filing history to examine, which removes most of the analytical value you would otherwise get from the registry. It is not disqualifying, but it means your verification has to lean much harder on the people and the site.

Business term is either open-ended or a fixed end date. A fixed term approaching expiry is worth a question: some companies let a term lapse and re-register as a new entity to shed history and liabilities. If the term expires within a year of your order, ask what happens to the entity afterward.

Field 7: Business Scope

Business scope is where the license most directly answers the question buyers actually have: is this company registered to make things, or only to sell them?

Scope is written in two blocks. General items can be operated after registration. Licensed items require a separate permit before the activity is permitted, and the license will say so — the standard boilerplate states that matters requiring approval according to law may only be operated once the relevant department has approved them. A scope containing licensed items but no corresponding permit is a gap worth naming.

For the manufacturing question, look for these verbs: produce, manufacture, process, assemble. Trading vocabulary looks different: sell, wholesale, retail, trade, import and export.

A scope that contains only sales and trade vocabulary, while the supplier describes itself as a manufacturer, is the single most common discrepancy we see. It does not prove fraud — scope language is often written broadly and copied from templates — but it is a documented, citable fact that shifts the burden: now the supplier has to explain, and you have something concrete to check on site.

Export capability is a separate question. If your order requires export, the scope should include goods import and export or technology import and export, and the company should hold customs registration as an exporter. Scope alone is not proof of the customs filing. Our step-by-step verification guide covers how to check the customs side.

Field 8: Registered Address

The address field is the registered address, which is not necessarily where anything is made. Plenty of legitimate companies register at a shared office address or at a government-designated cluster address and operate a plant elsewhere.

What makes this field useful is that the registered address carries legal consequences. If the registration authority cannot reach the company at that address, one of the four statutory triggers for the abnormal operations list is met, and the company is publicly listed as abnormal. The other three triggers are failing to publish the annual report, failing to publish required information on time, and publishing false information.

That makes the address a test you can run cheaply. Put it into a map service and look at the building. If a company claiming heavy industrial production is registered in a residential tower or a serviced-office suite, you have learned something. If dozens of unrelated companies share the exact same suite number and floor, you are looking at a cluster-registration address, which is common for trading and e-commerce but also for shells.

Field 9: Registration Authority and QR Code

The registration authority tells you which local bureau issued the license — typically a district or municipal Market Supervision Administration. This matters for two reasons: it tells you which local registry holds the authoritative record, and it tells you whether the issuing authority is plausible for the stated address. A license supposedly issued in Guangdong for a company registered in Shandong deserves a second look.

The issue date lets you compare against the establishment date. A license reissued shortly before your order can indicate a recent change of legal representative, capital or scope — all of which are logged in the registry's change records.

The QR code resolves to the company's record on the national registry at gsxt.gov.cn. Scanning it is the first verification step, not the last — a screenshot of a page can be edited as easily as the license itself. What you want is to reach the live record independently. Our visual guide to the national registry walks through that search.

How to Spot a Forged License

Licenses get edited, usually for one of five reasons. Knowing which fields are worth falsifying tells you where to look.

The reliable response is procedural rather than visual. Do three things, in this order:

1. Search the registry yourself. Take the company name or the 18-digit code and look it up on gsxt.gov.cn directly, in your own browser. Do not accept a link, a screenshot or a PDF as the source of truth.
2. Compare field by field. Name, code, legal representative, capital, establishment date, address, scope. A single mismatch on a document that is supposed to be a copy of an official record invalidates the whole document.
3. Recalculate the check digit. If the 18th character does not match the value produced by the first 17, the number is wrong — whether by error or intent.

What the License Cannot Tell You

The license is a registration document, and its scope is bounded. It will not tell you:

• Whether the company has been sued, or has sued others. Court judgments sit on a separate judicial platform, not the business registry.
• Whether it is subject to enforcement, or whether its legal representative has been listed as a dishonest debtor.
• Whether it can actually export — scope language is not the same as a customs filing.
• Whether it has real production capacity. Nothing on the page measures floor space, machines or staff. Only a site visit does that.
• Who actually controls it, once ownership runs through other companies. That requires tracing the chain, which is a different exercise.

What the license does is establish the baseline: this entity exists, this is its legal name, this is what it is registered to do, and this is where the record lives. Everything else builds on that baseline. If the baseline is wrong, everything above it is worthless.

For the full sequence — registration, court records, enforcement, export qualifications, tax status — read our step-by-step guide to verifying a Chinese company. And if you would rather have all of it cross-checked and written up in English, that is what our verification reports do.