Sooner or later, every importer sourcing from China ends up staring at a 营业执照 (yíngyè zhízhào — business license). It usually arrives as a WeChat photo or a scanned PDF, and most buyers give it the same ten-second treatment: red seal present, company name looks familiar, done.
That ten seconds is the problem. Almost everything worth reading on this document sits in the plain Chinese rows in the middle — not around the seal and the logo.
The license is the single official proof that a company legally exists in China. Think of it as the commercial registry extract, tax registration, and signature authority rolled into one page. The good news: the fields are standardized and every one of them is verifiable. The bad news: an unverified license image can be assembled in Photoshop in five minutes. Below, we go through each field and answer the only question that matters for each one — why should you look here?
Every business license printed after 2015 follows the same template. Image quality varies — photocopy, flatbed scan, phone photo taken at an angle — but the field labels never change. Reading top to bottom, you should see ten rows, and each one is a checkpoint.
The identity block comes first: 名称 (míngchēng) is the registered full company name, always in Chinese, always ending with a legal-form suffix such as 有限公司 (limited company). No English name appears here — whatever English name your supplier uses in emails is a marketing name, not a registered one. Next to it sits 统一社会信用代码, the Unified Social Credit Code (USCC): an 18-character mix of letters and digits that functions as the company's identity number. It never changes and cannot be transferred. Below those is 类型 (lèixíng), the company type — for example 有限责任公司（自然人投资或控股）, a limited liability company held by natural persons. This is your first hint about who actually owns the entity.
The people-and-money block follows. 法定代表人 (fǎdìng dàibiǎorén) is the legal representative, the one person legally empowered to sign and incur debt on the company's behalf. 注册资本 (zhùcè zīběn) is the registered capital the founders committed at incorporation. Then come two dates: 成立日期 (chénglì rìqī), the establishment date, and 营业期限 (yíngyè qīxiàn), the business term — most newer companies show 长期, meaning perpetual.
The last rows describe what the company does and where it sits. 经营范围 (jīngyíng fànwéi) is the business scope: the list of activities the company is legally registered to perform. 住所 (zhùsuǒ) is the registered address, and 登记机关 (dēngjì jīguān) is the registration authority — the local market regulation bureau (AMR) that issued the license.
A license you haven't read line by line is no better than a stamped blank sheet.
The rule here is simple: the USCC (统一社会信用代码) and the company name (名称) on the license must match each other, and both must resolve to the same record in the commercial registry. Each of the 18 characters carries meaning — the first digit encodes the entity type (9 for companies), characters 3–8 encode the administrative region, 9–17 are the organization code, and the last is a checksum digit.
This structure gives you cheap first-pass filters. For example, a code with 17 characters fails immediately — the length itself is the test. Under the national standard GB 32100-2015, the letters I, O, Z, S, and V never appear in a USCC at all, so a code containing "O" is suspect before you check anything else. A made-up code can often be eliminated on character count alone.
A typical scenario from the field: a supplier introduces himself on WeChat with a polished English trading name, but the license he sends reads something like 广东某照明有限公司 — a Chinese name you weren't expecting. That alone isn't a problem; a Chinese name can be rendered into English several ways. The real question is whether the name on the license matches the beneficiary name on the bank account you're about to pay, the party named in the contract, and the company the salesperson claims to work for. If those don't converge on one record, stop and ask: whose license is this, and what is your relationship to that company?
The region embedded in the name is a signal too. A company whose name starts with 深圳市 (Shenzhen) should have a Shenzhen district AMR as its registration authority (登记机关). If the name says Shenzhen but the issuing bureau is a small county office in Anhui, something on the document is inconsistent — or the image you received belongs to a different company entirely.
The name in the 法定代表人 (legal representative) field is, under Chinese law, the face of the company. If the person signing your contract is someone else, you are entitled to ask whether that signer holds a power of attorney. Cross-referencing this name against the officer list in registry records also tells you whether the individual is genuinely registered with the company.
Now the most commonly misread field on the document: 注册资本 (registered capital). Since the 2014 reform, China has used a subscribed-capital system. A founder can write down 5 million RMB while committing to pay it in over 30 years, with no requirement that the money sit in any account.
So when you see "注册资本：500万元" on a license, don't read it as cash on hand. Read it as the founder's statement of intended scale. The reverse cut matters more: if a company claiming to run a factory shows a token capital of 10,000 RMB, that is a legitimate reason to question whether real production infrastructure exists.
成立日期 (date of establishment) is one short line that does heavy work. If a supplier says "we've been in this industry for ten years" and the license shows incorporation 14 months ago, either the story and the record don't match, or the entity was set up as a successor to another structure. Asking about that is completely legitimate. The date alone doesn't make a company good or bad — but it is the cheapest test of whether the supplier's narrative and the public record overlap.
经营范围 (business scope) is the longest and least-read section of the license, and it holds the answer to the question every buyer asks: manufacturer or trading company? A scope containing 生产 (production), 制造 (manufacturing), or 加工 (processing) means the company is registered as a producer. A scope listing only 销售 (sales), 批发 (wholesale), 贸易 (trade), and 进出口 (import/export) describes a trading company.
For example, a license whose scope reads 服装批发、零售 (wholesale and retail of garments) with no 生产 or 加工 entry anywhere is a company that legally cannot manufacture the clothes it is offering you — whatever its website says.
Being a trading company is not a defect. A good trader often delivers more reliable logistics and quality control than a small factory. The problem is a counterparty who says "we are the factory" while their license contains not a single production-related word. Then you're holding either wrong information or, at best, an inflated presentation, and you should calibrate your pricing and quality expectations accordingly.
The 住所 (registered address) field enables a similar check. Compare the district in the address with the location of the claimed factory. If a seller says "our factory in Ningbo" but the registered address is the 23rd floor of an office tower in Shanghai, that is not by itself proof of fraud — many manufacturers register at a downtown office. But an address in a building known for virtual-office density is a sign that the company's physical presence needs separate verification. The region code in the USCC helps here too: characters 3–8 of the code should correspond to the province shown in the 住所 field.
The red seal in the lower right of the license is the official stamp of the registration authority. Don't confuse it with the company's own 公章 (corporate chop) — what belongs on the license is the seal of the bureau that issued it, and the text in the seal must match the authority named in the 登记机关 field exactly.
Modern licenses also carry a QR code (二维码). Scanned with a phone, it should open the company's record page on the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (gsxt.gov.cn). Scan the code on the image you received yourself: if it leads to the right company's registry page, that is a strong positive signal. If it opens a blank page, an unrelated company, or nothing at all, treat the document accordingly. A QR code that looks pasted onto the image — sharp edges, resolution that doesn't match the rest of the document — is a classic compositing trace.
One more practical note: what you receive will almost always be a scan of the 副本 (duplicate copy); the original (正本) hangs framed on the office wall. A copy is normal. What is less reassuring is a generic image with no "issued for this customer" watermark, circulating and reusable indefinitely. For significant transactions, asking for a fresh scan — or a moment on a video call where the document is physically held up — is an accepted request in Chinese business practice. No professional supplier takes offense at it.
The license tells you what the company claims about itself; the registry tells you what is actually on file. Don't decide on one without the other.
The official verification route is searching the USCC on gsxt.gov.cn. The system is in Chinese and occasionally difficult to reach from overseas IP addresses, which is why many importers use commercial databases like Tianyancha instead. Either way, every field from the license should appear in the registry record identically: name, USCC, legal representative, capital, dates, status. A single mismatch in a field that should never change — the USCC, the establishment date — is enough to pause the transaction.
Pay particular attention to the status field. A company whose license you hold but whose registry record shows 注销 (deregistered) or 吊销 (license revoked) instead of 存续 (active) is handing you direct evidence that the document is stale or fake. For information that never appears on the license at all — litigation records, enforcement cases, shareholder structure — you can verify the company by USCC through a due-diligence report, for example via China Trade Intel, where each line of the license maps to a corresponding registry entry.
The supplier refuses to share their business license. What now?
In China, the business license is based on public information, and sharing it is commercially routine. A refusal is not by itself an accusation, but a counterparty unwilling to disclose even their USCC is denying you the ability to verify them. At minimum, ask for the full Chinese company name and search the registry yourself.
Everything on the license checked out — is the risk gone?
No. License verification confirms that the company exists and what its registered particulars are. It says nothing about payment discipline, production capacity, or product quality. The license check is the first layer of due diligence, not the last.
Is an English translation of the license enough?
A translation helps you read it, but the authoritative document is the Chinese original — it carries both the legal validity and the verifiable fields. If you receive only an English text, request a scan of the Chinese original and confirm that the USCC and company name are identical across both documents.