Measurement recordUpdated when we re-test
Eight official Chinese sources buyers are told to check. We asked each one for its front page.
Every sourcing guide — ours included — tells buyers to verify suppliers against official Chinese sources. This page measures the step those guides skip: does each official front door actually open, and in which language? Same method as our registry-availability record: dated requests, control hosts on the same connection, and the limits stated.
Short answer
On the test date, five of eight official verification hosts would not serve their front page — from inside mainland China — while both control hosts returned 200 in the same session. None of the three that loaded carried an English-version marker on its front page. One court host served a browser and refused a command-line client.
The panel
Each host was requested at its root three times on 8 August 2026; every host returned the same status in all three rounds. Control hosts were requested from the same machine in the same session.
| Host | What buyers use it for | Result (3 of 3) | English front page |
|---|---|---|---|
www.gsxt.gov.cn | Company registry (GSXT) | 521 | — |
www.creditchina.gov.cn | Credit China: penalties, dishonesty lists | 412 | — |
wenshu.court.gov.cn | Court judgments | 200 | No marker found |
zxgk.court.gov.cn | Court enforcement records | 200 (browser UA only) | No marker found |
sbj.cnipa.gov.cn | Trademark office | 403 | — |
credit.customs.gov.cn | Customs enterprise credit | 412 | — |
openstd.samr.gov.cn | National standards (GB) texts | 200 | No marker found |
cx.cnca.cn | CCC certification queries | 521 | — |
www.gov.cn | Control — government host | 200 | |
www.baidu.com | Control — commercial host | 200 |
zxgk.court.gov.cn returned 403 to a plain command-line client and 200 to the same request with a desktop-browser user agent, in the same minute. The other seven hosts answered both clients identically. So at least one official source filters by client type — which matters if you are told “just script it”: a portal can be up for a person and down for a program.
All three are answers, not silence: a server received the request and declined it. 521 means the host was reachable but not serving the page; 412 (Precondition Failed) and 403 (Forbidden) are refusals. None of these is the signature of a blocked route — a blocked route usually produces no status code at all, and both control hosts served normally throughout.
Method
- Requests. HTTPS GET to each host root, three rounds, recording the status code. Round one was sent as a matched pair — a plain command-line user agent and a desktop-browser user agent — to expose client filtering; rounds two and three used the browser user agent.
- Controls.
www.gov.cn(a Chinese government host) andwww.baidu.com(a Chinese commercial host) were requested in the same session. Both returned 200 — so the failures are specific to these hosts, not a property of the connection, of China, or of.gov.cngenerally. - English detection. For hosts that served, the first 120 KB of front-page markup was scanned for English-version markers (an
Englishlink,lang="en", an/en/path). This is a front-page markup scan, nothing deeper. - What we did not do. No searches were submitted, no CAPTCHA was touched, no data was collected from any of these portals, and nothing was proxied or mirrored. Measuring whether a front door opens is a different activity from walking through it.
What this does not establish
- Nothing about overseas access. We do not have a trustworthy overseas observation point — the one we tried failed its own control test and was discarded. This panel is measured from inside mainland China only.
- Nothing beyond the front page. A 200 on the root does not mean a search completes: the interactive path may require verification steps this measurement never touched. And an English sub-site could exist somewhere the front-page markup does not announce.
- Nothing permanent. One connection, one date. A host that refuses this week may serve next week; a different Chinese ISP may see something else. Re-test rather than cite this as a standing condition.
- Nothing about any company. An unreachable portal is a fact about infrastructure on a date — not evidence that a record is missing or that anyone is concealing anything.
What a buyer does with this
The uncomfortable reading: the standard advice “check the official sources yourself” assumes a stack of portals that, on our test date, mostly declined to serve their own front pages even from inside China — and offered no English when they did. That is not a reason to skip verification; it is the reason verification is usually executed China-side by someone for whom these portals, their search paths and their verification steps are a daily logistics problem. That is the work this desk does, with the source and query date named per line.
Related: the registry-availability record this panel extends · how to read a registration record once you have one.
Citing this panel
Quote or reproduce these results freely, including commercially, provided the test date (8 August 2026), the vantage (one consumer connection inside mainland China) and the stated limits travel with them. The dates are load-bearing: a status code from August 2026 says nothing about these hosts today.
Currawong Web, “China official verification sources: availability panel”, three-round observations of eight official hosts with same-session controls, 8 August 2026, from one consumer connection inside mainland China.
https://currawongweb.com/verify/china-official-source-availability/
If you re-run this from another network or date and see something different, we want to hear it — corrections that survive checking get published here with attribution, including ones that contradict us.
This page reports connectivity observations. It is not legal advice, and it is not a statement about any company or about the completeness of any official database.