Original researchMeasured, dated, citable
Numbers we measured ourselves, free to cite with their dates.
Writing about Chinese suppliers, supply-chain risk or company registration usually means repeating someone else's assertion. This page collects the measurements we produced instead: each study states its frame, method, query date and what the numbers cannot show. If you are writing an article, an entry or a paper, this is the index.
The studies
- 264 top Chinese manufacturers: registration study (queried 8 August 2026) — a census, not a sample: every company on three official provincial excerpts of MIIT’s “Little Giant” list, read for scope wording, former names, capital fields and status. Findings: 74.6% carry import-export wording (so 25.4% do not), 53.4% have changed legal name, 37% show paid-in below subscribed capital, all 264 resolved as live registrations.
- How often Chinese company records change (queried 8 August 2026) — the change logs of the same 264 companies: 54.9% amended their registration within 12 months, 78.4% within 24; median lifetime change count 39; median days since last change 320.
- China official verification sources: availability panel (measured 8 August 2026) — eight official hosts requested three rounds each from inside mainland China with same-session controls: five refused their front page; none of the three that loaded carried an English-version marker; one court host served a browser and refused a command-line client.
- How much does a check digit protect you? (measured 9 August 2026) — 2.1 million deliberate transcription errors run through the USCI (GB 32100-2015) and VIN (49 CFR 565) check algorithms with a fixed seed: USCI caught 100% of single errors and 100% of data-position swaps; VIN caught 92.5% and 88.1%, with every single-substitution miss traced to same-value transliteration.
- How many Chinese trailer makers are NHTSA-registered? (captured 9 August 2026) — an exhaustive count of NHTSA's public vPIC manufacturer database: 22,881 registrants across 92 countries, 2,589 from China, and 106 Chinese trailer manufacturers — the full 106-name list published as CSV.
- Certificate registries: who can actually open them? (measured 9 August 2026) — eight certificate-verification registries probed three rounds each over two network paths with same-session controls: 5 of 8 answered a mainland-China connection; UL's Product iQ refused a scripted client on every path; both US government hosts refused the proxy egress while serving the direct one.
- China company registry availability (measured 5 and 8 August 2026) — the GSXT question specifically, with control hosts, a user-agent pair experiment, an independent same-method replication three days later — and one published conclusion we withdrew, documented on the page.
What these studies are, and are not
- Frames are stated, not implied. The 264-company frame is three official provincial excerpts of one national batch — elite, state-vetted manufacturers, not a random sample of Chinese suppliers. Rates measured on this frame are conservative bounds for claims like “even top manufacturers change names”; they are not population estimates.
- Registration data was read through licensed commercial data platforms that republish filings originating in the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System; person-name fields were discarded at collection. An absence on a platform is not proof of absence in the official record.
- Availability observations are dated, single-connection facts. A status code from August 2026 says nothing about a portal today, and our measurements support no conclusion about reachability from outside China — we have no trustworthy overseas observation point.
Citing this research
You are welcome to quote or reproduce these figures, including commercially, provided the observation date and the stated limits travel with them. The dates are load-bearing: citing a rate or a status code without its date misrepresents it. Link the study page rather than this index, so readers reach the method and limits. Each study page carries machine-readable Dataset metadata; if you need a clarification about method for a piece you are writing, the contact routes are here.
These pages report measurements, not legal conclusions, audits or safety findings, and none of them evaluates any specific supplier a reader is dealing with. For a specific supplier: the free in-browser screen or a dated China-side record check.