The latest version of the Chinese license looks like this.

Normally they will offer you an electronic copy, as these are public certificates and many stores put them on the wall for visitors to check.

First, you should ask for the company’s Chinese name and business license.

I will show you the real know-how to verify Chinese companies.

Rather than some old, moldy articles that tell you to check Chinese company directories online,

Step one is to make sure you are talking to a real qualified Chinese company and not a fake one.

Each Chinese registered company has a unique business registration number.

It is the ID for the company.

Now verify it on the “National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System”.

The URL is here.

http://www.gsxt.gov.cn/index.html

The domain “.gov.cn” shows it is the Chinese official government website.

The website layout is here.

Put in the Chinese company name or the registration number (recommended), and then press the red button.

You will come to this page:

The blue icon represents the company status, “in business” in this case.

With all this information, we can see this is indeed a real company, not a fake one.

Great! That’s an easy way to verify a company, right?

But what if you want to know more information? Is there a way you can get all of that in English?

The answer is yes.

tianyancha.com is the solution.

tianyancha.com is a commercial organization that offers a verification service for Chinese companies. It is quite popular in China with millions of paid users.

Thankfully, free users can also get a lot of useful information.

Visit tianyancha.com and type in the registration number.

Press the button.

Click the result. There will be only one result because the registration number is unique.

You will get a full report of the company in Chinese.

Now we need to translate the page in English, so we need to install the Chrome plugin for Google Translate.

Visit the link and add the plugin to your Chrome browser.

After installation, a small icon will come to the top right corner.

Return to the report page, find the Google Translate icon, then click “translate this page.”

See how easy that was? The whole page is now translated to English!

We can get a lot of information from the Background section.

Business Scope is a good reference to help decide if it is a manufacturer or trading company.

As we scroll down, we can find more interesting information.

In the Risk section, for example, we can see that there are 18 risk alerts for this particular company,

and we can see that “the company fails to fulfill their legal obligations but has been in court…”

To read more details you need to register as a paid user, but at least we know the potential risk.

We now know to think twice before we work with this company.

Keep rolling down to read more information.

Shareholder information

Change record

Patent information

Equity pledge and property mortgage history.

We can even see the company’s financial status.

Now you know a lot about the company’s background, and you can decide whether to proceed with the next step.