A supplier in Shenzhen sends you a business license. It shows ten million yuan in registered capital, a founding date in 2009, and an official red stamp across the bottom. It reads like a real factory, so you wire a thirty percent deposit on a forty-thousand-dollar order. The same document also recorded, in fields you were never taught to read, that the company had paid in just thirty thousand yuan of that ten million. Its registered scope read wholesale and trade rather than manufacturing. The legal representative was a name you had never heard from the person you had spent three weeks chatting to. None of it was concealed. It was printed on the license and published on China's public company registry the whole time.
The business license, the 营业执照, is the first document any legitimate Chinese company will send you, and the easiest one to glance at and believe. A scan looks official and the numbers look large, so most buyers stop reading. The page carries six fields that decide whether you are dealing with a factory or a middleman, whether the company can legally export, and whether it still exists at all. Every one of them is free to check, in about ten minutes, from any country in the world.
What a Chinese business license actually is
China issues one business license to every registered company, through the local Administration for Market Regulation bureau that sits under the national State Administration for Market Regulation, the SAMR. The license is the company's legal proof of existence, and its date of issue is the company's date of establishment. No license, no company, however polished the website looks.
Printed across the top of every modern license is the 统一社会信用代码, the Unified Social Credit Code. It is an eighteen-character string of letters and digits, rolled out across China in 2015, and it works like a national ID number for the business: one code, unique, for the life of the company. The same eighteen characters appear on the license, on the company's official stamp, on its customs declarations, and on the VAT invoices it issues. It is the single most useful thing on the page, because it is the key to every other check below.
The six fields that tell you who you are dealing with
Read these six, in this order, before any money is discussed.
The company name that matters is the Chinese one. The English name on the website and the email signature has no legal standing in China. The 营业执照 carries the registered Chinese name, and that is the name that must appear on your contract, on the company stamp, and on the bank account you pay into. When the Chinese name on the license does not match the beneficiary on the wire instructions you were sent, that is not a clerical quirk. It is the most common way a deposit gets diverted.
The Unified Social Credit Code is the eighteen-character identifier you will use to verify everything else. Copy it down exactly. One wrong character and you are checking a different company, or no company at all.
The business scope, the 经营范围, is the field that quietly answers factory or trader. A scope that includes a production verb for your product category, 生产 or 制造, points to a factory. A scope built around 批发, 零售 or 贸易, wholesale, retail or trade, with no manufacturing in it, points to a trading company. A trader is not automatically the wrong partner. You should know you are paying a layer of margin to someone who will have your goods made out of your sight, and price and protect yourself for that. Telling a real factory from a trading company is its own job, and the scope field is where it starts. The scope also governs whether the company may legally export at all; some genuine small factories sell only inside China and route any export through a separate agent.
The registered capital, the 注册资本, is the number most importers misread, and it gets its own section below.
The legal representative, the 法定代表人, is the single person empowered to bind the company. The cheerful contact answering your messages is usually a salesperson, not the legal representative, and a contract or an NNN agreement only holds when the entity on the license signs and stamps it. This is the same reason a bilingual NNN is worth nothing until the correct company chops it.
The registration status and establishment date tell you whether the company is alive. A record reads 存续 or 在营, active and operating, or 注销 and 吊销, cancelled and revoked. A revoked company can still email you a handsome license PDF from five years ago. That status lives on the public registry, not on the scan, which is why the scan on its own is never enough.
Registered capital: what the 2024 Company Law changed
Registered capital is the amount a company's shareholders pledged to put in. It has never been the amount of money sitting in the bank. For years a Chinese company could register ten million yuan of capital and contribute none of it, which made the figure close to meaningless and made an impressive-looking license cheap to produce.
That changed on 1 July 2024, when the revised Company Law of the People's Republic of China came into force. Article 47 now requires the shareholders of a limited liability company to pay their subscribed capital in full within five years of the company's establishment. Companies set up before that date were given a transition window running to 30 June 2027 before the five-year clock applies to them. The headline number on a license therefore carries more weight than it did two years ago, but it still records what was promised, not what was paid.
The figure you actually want is the paid-in capital, the 实缴资本, and you read it on the registry rather than the license. A one-million-yuan capital that is fully paid, from a company that has traded for a decade, tells you more than a fifty-million-yuan pledge from a two-year-old firm with nothing behind it. Large promised numbers are the easiest thing in the world to print. Do not let the biggest figure on the page stand in for diligence you have not done.
How to verify all of it in ten minutes
Everything above is checkable, for free, on one official site: the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System, gsxt.gov.cn, run by SAMR. Every company registered in mainland China is on it, and it is the registry that Chinese courts, banks and customs treat as authoritative.
Search by the Chinese company name or by the eighteen-character Unified Social Credit Code. The English trading name will return nothing. When the company record opens, check four things. The code and the Chinese name match the license exactly. The status reads 存续 or 在营, not 注销 or 吊销. The business scope covers manufacturing your product, if you were told this is a factory. And the paid-in capital, the establishment date and the legal representative all line up with the license and with the person you have been dealing with.
Then run one more cross-check that catches most fraud on its own. Put the eighteen-character code side by side in three places: the business license, the red company chop, the 公章, stamped on your contract, and the VAT invoice, the fapiao, the company issues. The code and the Chinese name must be identical in all three. Your deposit goes to the company named on the license, through its own corporate account, never to a personal account or a separately named "finance company" that appears at the last moment.
The registry is in Chinese and sometimes asks for a slider captcha, so a Mandarin reader or a sourcing agent on the ground will run it faster than you will. That is the only real barrier. The information itself is public and free. Importers do not lose deposits because this data is hidden. They lose them because the wire goes out before anyone reads it.
What a clean license still cannot tell you
A verified license proves that a company legally exists and is allowed to do what it claims. It does not prove there is a factory behind the name, that the factory owns the machines and the capacity for your order, or that what comes off the line will match your sample. Properly registered companies with a manufacturing scope still subcontract orders they cannot run, operate at the edge of their capacity, and quote work they intend to place elsewhere. The license is the floor you start from, not the ceiling.
Closing that gap takes a person inside the building, matching the code and the chop on the license to the machines, the staff and the production line actually in front of them. That is what a Mila sourcing agent does on the ground in Shenzhen, Yiwu or Ningbo. They verify the entity on the registry, then stand in the factory it claims to be, run a GPS-stamped video walkthrough, and put a full supplier verification in the same WhatsApp thread you use to run the order, before a deposit moves. If you are weighing a new supplier now, or you are not certain the company you already pay is the one that makes your goods, audit your current supplier in 48 hours and have an agent confirm the license against what is actually on the floor.
Sources: National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (国家企业信用信息公示系统), State Administration for Market Regulation; DLA Piper, "China Releases Implementing Provisions on Registered Capital Registration Under the New Company Law" (August 2024); China Briefing (Dezan Shira & Associates), "Registered Capital in China: New Rules for Shareholder Payment Terms".