Measurement recordUpdated when we re-test
Does the China company registry actually open? We measured it instead of guessing.
Plenty of pages assert that the official registry is unreachable from abroad. We could not find one that showed its working, so this page is ours: dated observations, the control sites that make them interpretable, the questions our setup cannot answer, and one conclusion we published and later had to withdraw.
Short answer
On the two dates we tested, www.gsxt.gov.cn did not serve — from inside mainland China. Every attempt returned HTTP 521, while www.gov.cn and www.baidu.com returned 200 from the same machine minutes apart.
So the common explanation — that this is about being outside China — does not fit our observations. What we can say is narrower: on these dates, from this connection, the registry answered with an error rather than a page.
The observations
Each row is a request to the host root, recorded with its status code. Control hosts were requested from the same machine in the same session, which is what makes the target rows mean anything.
8 August 2026 — consumer connection, mainland China
| Host | Role | Result | Attempts |
|---|---|---|---|
www.gsxt.gov.cn | Target | 521 | 3 of 3 |
www.creditchina.gov.cn | Target | 412 | 3 of 3 |
www.gov.cn | Control — Chinese government host | 200 | 1 of 1 |
www.baidu.com | Control — Chinese commercial host | 200 | 1 of 1 |
Two of the three target attempts were run as a matched pair: the same request with a default command-line user agent and with a desktop browser user agent. Both returned the same code for both targets, so the user agent is not the variable here.
5 August 2026 — same connection, three days earlier
| Host | Role | Result | Attempts |
|---|---|---|---|
www.gsxt.gov.cn | Target | 521 | 3 of 3 |
www.gov.cn | Control — Chinese government host | 200 | same moment |
The 8 August run was carried out independently, without reference to the earlier figures, and reproduced them. Two observations three days apart is not a trend, but it is better than one.
521 is not the browser failing to find the server. It means a server answered and returned an error, so the host was reachable but not serving the page. 412 (Precondition Failed) likewise comes from a server that received the request and declined it. Neither is the signature of a blocked route — a blocked route usually produces no status code at all.
How this was measured, and why the control rows are the important ones
A single failing request tells you almost nothing. It could be the target, the network, the client, or the moment. Each control host is there to remove one of those explanations:
www.baidu.com— a Chinese commercial host. If it also failed, the finding would be “this connection cannot reach China”, not anything about the registry.www.gov.cn— a Chinese government host. This is the row that matters most. If it failed too, the finding would be “government hosts are unreachable from here”. It returned 200, so whatever is happening is specific to the registry rather than general to.gov.cn.- The user-agent pair — the same request sent twice, once as a plain command-line client and once as a desktop browser. Identical results remove “they are filtering non-browser clients” as the explanation.
Requests were made to the host root only. This page does not submit searches, solve or bypass CAPTCHA, automate data collection, proxy the portal, or mirror any record. Measuring whether a front door opens is a different activity from walking through it, and only the first one is described here.
What this does not establish
- Nothing about any company. A registry that will not load is not evidence that a record is missing, that a supplier is unregistered, or that anyone is concealing anything. It is a fact about the portal on a date, not about a counterparty.
- Nothing about access from outside China. We do not have a trustworthy overseas observation point — see the correction below for why the one we tried was worthless. Anyone claiming a figure for overseas reachability should be asked what their control host was.
- Nothing permanent. Two dates, one connection. A portal that errors this week may serve normally next week, and a different Chinese ISP may see something else entirely. Re-test rather than cite this as a standing condition.
- Nothing about the interactive path. Even when the portal loads, it may require verification steps before returning a record. A 200 on the front page would not by itself mean a search will complete.
A conclusion we withdrew
An earlier version of our registration guide stated that Chinese government sites were unreachable from outside China, based on our own overseas egress failing TLS against gsxt.gov.cn, creditchina.gov.cn and www.gov.cn alike. That was wrong, and it is worth setting out how it broke, because the same trap is available to anyone running this test.
The measurement lacked a control: a government host belonging to some other country. When we added one, the reasoning collapsed. www.abf.gov.au — the Australian Border Force — also failed TLS through that same egress, while serving normally on a direct connection from China. An Australian government site does not block Australian traffic and serve Chinese traffic. The failure was a property of our route, not of the destinations.
Everything that route produced about overseas access was therefore discarded, and this page carries no overseas figures at all. We would rather publish a smaller claim than a confident one we cannot support.
Check that your two paths are genuinely different before comparing them. On the machine used here, a shell profile silently attached a proxy to every request, so a run labelled “direct” was travelling the same route as the run labelled “proxied” — identical exit IP, near-identical timings. Requesting an IP-echo service on both paths takes seconds and catches it.
If you need the registration record anyway
Portal availability is a logistics problem, not a dead end. In the order we would try it:
- Ask the supplier for the 18-character Unified Social Credit Code in writing and check it against the business licence and the contract. Our code checker validates the structure and check digit in your browser, with no portal access and nothing sent anywhere — and the licence’s scope text can be read the same way in the free in-browser check.
- Ask a counterpart inside China to run the search and send the result with the date they ran it.
- Have the check run China-side and returned with its sources, query date and stated limits — what this desk does.
Related: how to read a registration record once you have one · where registry checks sit among the things that actually decide an order.
Citing this measurement
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: a status code from August 2026 says nothing about the portal today, and citing it without its date would misrepresent it.
A citation with everything it needs:
Currawong Web, “China company registry availability: what we measured”, observations of 5 and 8 August 2026 from one consumer connection inside mainland China.
https://currawongweb.com/verify/china-company-registry-availability/
If you re-run this and see something different — another Chinese ISP, another date, a working overseas observation point — we would rather hear it than be the only source. Corrections that survive checking get published here with attribution, including ones that contradict us.
This page reports connectivity observations. It is not legal advice, not a compliance opinion, and not a statement about any company’s registration status.