Buyer questionAnswered from the China side
A red stamp arrived on your contract. What does it actually prove?
Buyers are told the company chop is what makes a Chinese contract binding, and then told to check that it is genuine. The first half is roughly right. The second half describes something you cannot do: seals are registered with the police, and that register is not open to you or to us. Meanwhile the published guidance Chinese courts work from does not turn on whether the seal was genuine at all — it turns on whether the person who applied it had authority to bind the company. This page is about what is left that you can actually check.
COMPANY CHOP / 01
The chop is treated as a password, and it is not one.
Every conclusion below follows from that. A genuine seal applied by someone with no authority does not save you; an authorised signature with no seal at all may bind the company perfectly well.
What a company chop is
The official company seal (公章) is the company’s general-purpose executing instrument. Chinese practice is that seals may only be produced by engravers designated by the Public Security Bureau, and each seal is filed with the PSB for the record. Seals are commonly carried with a registration code issued through that process and with anti-counterfeit features that let the authorities identify a genuine impression.
Companies hold several seals with different jobs. The one on a sales contract should be the official company seal or a dedicated contract seal (合同专用章). A financial seal or an invoice seal appearing on a contract is a signal to ask a question, not because it is necessarily improper, but because it suggests the document was executed by whoever happened to have a seal to hand.
The legal representative’s personal name seal is a different instrument again, and the identity of the legal representative is one of the few things about all of this that is publicly registered. What the registration record carries, field by field.
Why you cannot look one up — and neither can we
The PSB filing exists so that the authorities can distinguish a genuine seal from a forged one, typically in the course of an investigation or a court proceeding. It is not a public search service. There is no portal, Chinese or foreign, where a buyer enters a company name and is shown the registered impression of its seal.
This has a practical consequence worth being blunt about: nobody can authenticate a chop from a photograph or a PDF. What a careful reader can do from an image is compare the characters, the shape and the seal type against what the public record says the company is called. That is a name comparison, not an authentication, and it is worth exactly what it is.
Electronic seals are now widely used and, under China’s electronic signature framework, a reliable electronic signature can carry the same legal effect as a physical one. That does not change the position above. It changes what the artefact looks like, not whether you can check it against a register.
What Chinese courts actually look at
This is the part that reframes the whole question, and it is published guidance rather than folklore. The Supreme People’s Court’s 2019 conference minutes on civil and commercial trial work address contracts executed with a seal, and the approach they set out is often summarised in Chinese practice as look at the person, not at the chop.
Two consequences follow for a buyer:
A genuine seal is not automatically enough. Where the person who applied it had no authority to bind the company, the company can and does contest the contract. The seal being real is not the end of that argument.
A missing seal is not automatically fatal. A contract signed by the legal representative, or by someone with authority, can bind the company without a seal on it.
So the diligence that matters is not forensic. It is knowing who signed, in what capacity, and whether that person is connected to the registered entity you think you are dealing with. The legal representative is named in the public record; anyone else signing is doing so on authority you have not seen unless you asked for it. Where this sits in the wider pre-order sequence.
This is a description of published guidance, not legal advice, and it is not a prediction of how any particular dispute would be decided. If a contract matters enough to litigate, it matters enough to have a China-qualified lawyer look at it before signature.
The one check that works, and it is free
The characters on a company seal are the company’s full registered Chinese name. That name is public. So the comparison is available to you even though the seal register is not:
Read the Chinese characters on the impression. Not the English name on the letterhead, and not the trading name on the platform storefront — the Chinese characters in the ring of the seal.
Compare them to the registered name on the public record, retrieved by the 18-character unified social credit code rather than by name. Names repeat across thousands of companies; the code does not. What the code is and how to read it.
Treat a mismatch as a question, not a verdict. The commonest innocent explanation is the one this whole area keeps producing: the group has more than one entity, and the one that executes contracts is not the one whose brochure you were reading. That is legitimate and it is also exactly what a diversion looks like. Ask which legal entity is contracting, in writing, and get the answer before money moves.
Check the name against the former names too. Companies rename. In our census of 264 state-recognised manufacturers, 53.4% had changed their registered name at least once and 22.7% twice or more. A seal carrying a name your file does not recognise is not necessarily a different company. The change-history census.
What we do not do
We do not authenticate seals. We cannot, and we will not imply otherwise by returning a confident-looking assessment of an image. The register that would settle it is not open to us.
We do not carry out forensic document examination, and we do not compare an impression against a specimen to give an opinion on whether it was made by the same seal.
We do not give legal advice and do not opine on whether a contract is binding, enforceable, or properly executed.
What we do is the name comparison described above, from the public registration record: registered name, former names, unified social credit code, status and legal representative, reported with the source and the date the record was read.
Not legal advice. Positions described from published Chinese legal sources as at 12 August 2026, and a record check is not a judgement on any document you hold.