Chinese Company Registration Status: The Seven States and What They Mean

Before you discuss prices, MOQs, or shipping terms with any Chinese supplier, you should answer one question: is this company legally alive?

A surprising number of cross-border disputes involve Chinese counterparties that were already in revocation or deregistration when the contract was signed. The buyer never checked. The contract was, from the moment of signing, unenforceable.

This guide walks through China's seven registration statuses, what each means, and which ones are safe to do business with.

The seven possible registration statuses

China's corporate registration system uses several status labels. The terminology varies slightly by province, but the substance is uniform across the country.

Only "Existence" (存续) is a green light. Everything else is a yellow or red flag. Signing a contract with a company in any other status means you are exposed to substantial losses with very limited legal recourse.

Why each non-existence status is dangerous

Revocation (吊销)

Revocation is the most serious administrative penalty SAMR can impose. It is reserved for serious violations such as failing to file annual reports for multiple years, providing false registration information, or engaging in business outside the lawful scope.

After revocation, the company is required by law to liquidate and deregister. It is barred from signing new contracts. A company in revocation that is still actively soliciting orders is, by definition, operating unlawfully.

Deregistration (注销)

Deregistration is the legal endpoint. Once a Chinese company is deregistered, it has no legal personality. It cannot sue, be sued, hold assets, or honour obligations.

Any contract signed on behalf of a deregistered company is void from the outset. If you wired payment to a deregistered company yesterday, recovering that money is enormously harder than dealing with a normal commercial dispute, because there is no legal entity to sue.

The only realistic path to recovery in this scenario is pursuing the former shareholders directly under specific liability theories — a much narrower and more difficult avenue than ordinary breach-of-contract litigation.

Suspension (停业)

Suspension is voluntary. The shareholders, for whatever reason, have registered the company as inactive. During suspension, the company is not engaged in business and does not have the supply chain relationships necessary to fulfil orders.

Even if the company signs a contract, it cannot perform. A supplier in suspension status who promises a delivery in 60 days is either lying or has not told you they have suspended operations.

Liquidation (清算)

Liquidation signals the company is in the final pre-deregistration phase. Existing creditors should accelerate collection efforts; new commercial counterparties should walk away.

Note that bankruptcy itself does not initially appear in the registration status. A Chinese company that has just commenced bankruptcy proceedings will still appear as "存续" until the liquidation phase begins. To detect early-stage bankruptcy, you must check sources beyond GSXT — court announcement databases, in particular.

Moving in / Moving out (迁入 / 迁出)

This refers to the process of changing a company's registered address between SAMR jurisdictions (e.g., relocating from Shanghai to Hangzhou).

This is not necessarily a red flag — legitimate companies relocate. But during the transit period, the company's records may be partially unavailable, and signing major contracts is best deferred until the move completes and the new registration shows "Existence" again.

Annulment (撤销)

Annulment is a relatively rare status that means the registration itself was retroactively voided — typically because someone used another person's identity documents to incorporate the company without consent.

These entities should be treated as scams from the moment annulment is recorded. The "company" was never a legitimate business in the eyes of the law.

How to check registration status (the official way)

1. Go to GSXT: gsxt.gov.cn
2. The interface is in Chinese only. Paste the company's full legal Chinese name (not English) into the search box.
3. Solve the picture-based CAPTCHA. The system uses sliding-puzzle CAPTCHAs that occasionally fail on the first attempt; persistence helps.
4. Click the matching company in the results. The status (登记状态 / 经营状态) is shown on the entity's detail page.
5. If the search returns no results: either the company does not exist under the name you searched, or the name has been changed. Both should be treated as a red flag pending further investigation.

If you do not have the legal Chinese name, you cannot do this check. See our guide on finding the legal Chinese name for the workflow.

How to check registration status (the fast way)

If you do not read Chinese or do not want to bypass CAPTCHAs every few minutes, an automated platform can do this in seconds.

ChinaCheck's Basic Information Report returns the registration status alongside all eight other core registration fields, as a PDF in your language — usually within 30 seconds of the search.

A practical rule of thumb

If a Chinese supplier provides a Business License but you have not independently confirmed the registration status on GSXT (or via an automated platform), you have not verified the company. The Business License is just a piece of paper; the GSXT record is the live source of truth.

The rest of this guide series builds on this baseline check. Read The Chinese Business License next to learn what each field on that document actually means.