Due to a lack of knowledge of China’s legal system and online information platforms, many European companies don’t know where to start their investigations when it comes to Chinese individuals and companies. Here I want to share some useful websites for your investigations on China. They are accessible for almost everyone and most of the information there is also free of charge.
1.National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (国家企业信用信息公示系统)
http://www.gsxt.gov.cn/index.html
This governmental website belongs to one of my favorite websites. If the company you’re investigating is legally registered in China, you should be able to find it here. You can find some basic information on this company like registered capital, legal representative and incorporation date, as well as information on penalty history and business irregularity records. The information on this website is quite reliable. You can even download the whole report if you need a nice documentation. The disadvantage is that the connection to the website can be sometimes unstable especially when you are trying to access it from overseas, which seems to be a common problem for many Chinese governmental websites.
2.Court Enforcement Information Publicity (中国执行信息公开网)
http://zxgk.court.gov.cn/
This is a website where you can find all the Chinese individuals and enterprises that are identified as being involved in dishonest business activities by the court. They might be companies that owe loans to workers or people who don’t pay their credit on time. People and companies who have already fulfilled their obligations would no longer appear here. You can add the ID number of your objects by the inquiry to get more accurate results.
3.China Judgements Online (中国裁判文书网)
https://wenshu.court.gov.cn/
Here you can find detailed information about current judgments issued by different regional courts in China. You can specify your search with certain court type, certain region and even the lawyer’s name which is useful if you’re interested in the cases a certain lawyer has dealt with. Some judgments from autonomous minority regions are also available in other languages (Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, Korean and Kazakh) besides Chinese.
4.Cninfo (巨潮资讯网)
http://www.cninfo.com.cn/new/index
All the public companies in China are required to publish their financial reports and regular announcements on this website. So, if your object is a Chinese company listed at the two stock exchanges in Mainland China (Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange), you should find the most essential figures of that company over the recent years (Reports of Mainland Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong can also be found here). You can also search with the name of executives to see if they are employed by a listed company.
5.QCC (private, qichacha, 企查查)
https://www.qcc.com/
This is a private platform providing company information. Besides basic registration information, you can also find shareholder structure, beneficial owners, business authorization certificates, patent information, etc. It’s one of the biggest providers of such information in China. They collect the information by crawling data from different authority websites and visualize the information in a much better way. You can register for free to see most of the information and sometimes pay a membership to get more customized service.
6.Qixin (private, 启信宝)
https://www.qixin.com/
It’s quite similar to the QCC platform. For some companies, you may find salary distribution and the number of employees with health insurance. But this kind of information is not always available or very reliable depending on the company.
7.Tianyancha (private, 天眼查)
https://www.tianyancha.com/
This is another similar private platform for credit information. But overseas IPs are not allowed to visit this website unless you have set up a special VPN.
These private websites are using very similar methods to crawl information from open sources. They have even very similar categories on their websites. The biggest difference you can feel might be the number of results displayed when you search for information with keywords because there use different algorithms. Like all such private information providers in the world, you must be careful about the results you get there as they might have crawled the wrong data. These three mentioned above are the leading ones in this area and make fewer mistakes but not none. If you are just looking for some basic information, then there is not much difference which one you use. But for more complicated information like the shareholder structure and company families, you’d better compare it with the governmental websites to validate the information. And of course, the price for the membership can also be a factor you’ll consider.
However, I think the biggest challenge for investigations on China is the language rather than the availability of information. To conquer this challenge, you don’t only need advanced translators to get rational sentences, but also understand how their names are built, how the companies are differently structured compared to your country and so on. If you have different ways and sources for credit investigation on China, welcome to share with me.
