Currawong WebEvidence-first China sourcing

Field noteThe JPEG in your inbox

What a licence photo can — and cannot — prove.

The instinct is to ask whether the image is fake. It is almost always the wrong question, and answering it confidently would be the wrong service. A licence image can be genuine, the stamp genuine, the document current — and still fail to support the conclusion drawn from it. Here is what the picture establishes, and what it structurally cannot.

· 5-minute read · Regulation text checked 9 August 2026

Prepared by Currawong Web’s China-side verification network.

1. What the image does establish

One thing, and it is worth having: a legible set of registered fields — the name, the entity type, the scope, the domicile, the registered capital, the legal representative, and the 18-character Unified Social Credit Code. What each of those fields is worth is a separate question, and the answer is often less than buyers assume.

What makes the image useful is not that it is a document. It is that the code on it is a lookup key. Everything else on the page is a claim about the past; the code is the one field that lets you ask about the present.

2. It describes a moment, and the moment moves

Under State Council Order No. 746, the issue date of a licence is the entity’s date of establishment — not a freshness stamp. Registered items must be updated within 30 days of the change, and the authority reissues the licence only when a change touches an item printed on it. Nothing in that chain sends you a new photo.

We measured how much that matters. Reading the change logs of 264 officially recognised manufacturers:

  • 54.9% had amended their registration within the previous 12 months;
  • 78.4% within 24 months;
  • the median company’s most recent change was 320 days old, out of a median 39 lifetime changes.

So a licence image saved a year ago has meaningful odds of describing a company that has since changed something — possibly the name, possibly the legal representative, possibly the scope you relied on. And the two states that most damage a buyer are invisible on paper by design: a company whose licence has been revoked (吊销) or deregistered (注销) still holds a document that looks entirely normal.

3. Why we do not analyse the image

There is a genre of sourcing advice that teaches buyers to hunt for tampering in the pixels — compression artefacts, error-level analysis, misaligned stamps. We deliberately do not do this, for two reasons.

We cannot stand behind a verdict produced that way. By the time a licence reaches you it has usually been photographed, re-saved and pushed through at least one messenger, each step rewriting the pixels any such method would be reading. We are not document examiners and do not claim to be. A confident “this is photoshopped” from a JPEG is precisely the kind of manufactured certainty this desk exists to avoid — and a false negative is worse than no answer, because it ends the inquiry.

It answers a question that is rarely the live one. A genuine document is not the same as a genuine counterparty. Chinese regulation deals with this head-on: forging, altering, leasing, lending or transferring a business licence draws confiscation of unlawful gains and fines reaching RMB 500,000 in serious cases. Rules are written for behaviour that occurs. So the licence in front of you can be entirely authentic, entirely current, and still belong to a company that is not the one writing to you.

4. What to do instead

  • Take the code, not the name. Check the current record against the 18-character code, and write down the date you checked it. A name from an old invoice may no longer belong to that company — 53.4% of those 264 manufacturers had changed their legal name at least once.
  • Match three parties, not one document. The entity on the licence, the entity issuing the invoice and the account holder receiving payment should be reconciled explicitly. Where they legitimately differ, get the relationship in writing at quotation stage — not when the payment instruction arrives.
  • Ask what the paper cannot answer. Production capability, capacity and quality history are not registered items; no licence carries them, and a registered address is not a factory site.
  • Re-check before money moves, not once at onboarding. Given the change rates above, a check performed at first contact is a different fact from a check performed the week you pay.

This note describes registration rules as published by Chinese authorities and figures from our own dated census; it is not legal advice, not an audit and not a document-authentication service. We do not certify that any image is genuine or forged. Records reach us through licensed commercial data platforms that republish filings originating in the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System; an absence on a platform is not proof of absence in the official record. A scoped China-side check returns the current record with its source and query date, which is the claim a public record can actually support.

Primary sources