Original measurement46 registry records · three fields
China registration fields: what capital, status and scope prove. I measured.
Do not clear a supplier because the record shows large registered capital, active status and manufacturing wording. I read those three fields across 46 Chinese manufacturers to measure what each one establishes. Each answers a narrower question than buyers often assume.
1. Registered capital is a promise with a deadline
Under China’s subscribed-capital system a founder states an amount and a date by which it will be contributed. The registry publishes the promise. Whether it was kept is a separate field, and often an empty one.
| What the record shows | Companies | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Paid-in disclosed and equal to the subscribed figure | 16 of 46 | 34.8% |
| Paid-in disclosed and below the subscribed figure | 13 of 46 | 28.3% |
| Paid-in not disclosed at all | 17 of 46 | 37.0% |
| Any published shareholder-contribution filing | 18 of 46 | 39.1% |
Subscribed capital on this frame runs from ¥100,000 to ¥1,023,855,833, median ¥10,000,000. That thousand-fold spread is the reason the number reads as a size signal. Yet 65.2% of the frame gives a buyer no confirmed paid-in figure to place inside it.
Who does not disclose, and why our two frames disagree
The companies withholding a paid-in figure are the younger and smaller ones. The 17 that disclose nothing were founded on average in 2017 and carry a median subscribed capital of ¥3,000,000; the 29 that do disclose were founded on average in 2011 with a median of ¥20,000,000. Under the 2024 Company Law a founder has five years to contribute. A company incorporated recently with an unmet subscription has nothing to report yet. An empty field is the expected state.
That also reconciles this study with our own earlier one, which should be read alongside it. In the census of 264 MIIT “Little Giant” manufacturers, only two records carried no paid-in figure at all, and 37.0% of the rest showed paid-in below subscribed. Those are government-designated SMEs: older, larger and already through a selection process. On this frame — ordinary exporters on a US regulator’s roster — disclosure drops to 63.0%. The disclosure rate depends on which companies you are looking at. A buyer applying either figure to a supplier of unknown vintage is applying the wrong one.
2. Status is a state (never a grade), and it is written three ways
Every one of the 46 records carries a status meaning the company is live. It is written as 存续 on 26, 开业 on 19 and 仍注册 on one. A reader who does not read Chinese, translating each separately, gets three different English words for one fact.
Company type is worse. The 46 records carry 11 distinct type strings, and two of them are the same type written with full-width and half-width brackets. Anyone grouping suppliers by company type from this field, without normalising the punctuation first, will split one category into two. I classified each of those 11 strings by liability, export eligibility and contract risk in a separate entity type study.
The practical consequence: status tells you the registration has not been revoked or cancelled. It carries no information about trading history, solvency or delivery, and a buyer who reads “active” as “checked” has read a word that was never doing that work.
3. Business scope cannot tell a factory from a trader
| Business scope wording | Companies | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Mentions sale, wholesale, retail or trade | 45 of 46 | 97.8% |
| Mentions manufacture, production or processing | 39 of 46 | 84.8% |
| Mentions both | 39 of 46 | 84.8% |
| Mentions manufacture without mentioning trade | 0 of 46 | 0% |
| Mentions trade without mentioning manufacture | 6 of 46 | 13.0% |
| Mentions import-export wording | 36 of 46 | 78.3% |
Read the fourth row again. Every company on this frame that claims manufacturing also claims selling, so a scope containing “manufacture” never rules out a trading operation. The reverse test does work a little: 13.0% mention trade and no production at all, and that is a real signal — the only direction in which this field discriminates.
Scope is also long and increasingly formulaic: median 194 characters, longest 591, with 65.2% now using the post-2021 licensed-project and general-project prefix format. Length is not detail; it is a template.
4. Method, and what this study cannot say
The frame is the 46 companies from our candidate-ordering study that resolved to exactly one registry record carrying an 18-character code. This is the same cohort several earlier studies use, so results stack. Each was queried by that code. A code is unambiguous; a name is not. Two licensed interfaces were used: company base information and published shareholder contribution. No retry.
A platform response of “no record found” is counted as a legitimate zero — never a read failure. The same rule applies in the live free-signal layer. An empty paid-in capital string is recorded as undisclosed, never as zero.
What it cannot say
- Undisclosed is not unpaid. A company may have contributed in full and simply not published it. The measurement is about what a buyer can see. It does not address what happened.
- Nothing here evaluates a supplier. These are field-level properties of a record. They are not judgements about any company.
- One platform, one day. The data comes from a licensed Chinese business-information platform. It does not come from the government portal directly. Platform coverage is not identical to official coverage.
- 46 manufacturers in one industry. The frame is trailer manufacturers on a US regulator’s roster. Scope wording in other industries will differ.
- Keyword matching on scope is coarse. Presence of a word is not proof of the activity, and a company can perform work its scope never names.
Questions about this study
Does large registered capital mean a Chinese supplier is financially strong?
Not necessarily. Under China’s subscribed-capital system, registered capital is a promise with a deadline — it is not money in an account. Across 46 Chinese manufacturers, only 34.8% disclosed a paid-in figure equal to the subscribed one. 28.3% disclosed a lower figure and 37.0% disclosed no paid-in amount at all. Subscribed capital on this frame ranges from ¥100,000 to over ¥1 billion. Without a confirmed paid-in figure, the number tells you what the founders said they would contribute. It does not show what they did.
What does “active” status mean on a Chinese company registration?
It means the registration has not been revoked or cancelled. All 46 records in our frame carry a status meaning the company is live, but the status is written three different ways in Chinese. A reader translating each separately gets three different English words for one fact. Status carries no information about trading history, solvency or delivery capability. A buyer who reads “active” as “checked” has read a word that was never doing that work.
Can business scope tell me if a supplier is a factory or a trading company?
Almost never. In our 46-company frame, 84.8% mention both manufacturing and trading in their scope, and 0 of 46 mention manufacturing without also mentioning trade. The only direction in which scope discriminates is the reverse: 13.0% mention trade and no production at all, which is a real signal. Scope is also increasingly formulaic, with a median length of 194 characters and 65.2% using the post-2021 licensed-project prefix format.
Why do younger companies disclose less capital information?
Under the 2024 Company Law a founder has five years to contribute subscribed capital. A company incorporated recently with an unmet subscription has nothing to report yet. An empty paid-in field is the expected state. In our frame, the 17 companies that disclose no paid-in figure were founded on average in 2017 with a median subscribed capital of ¥3,000,000. The 29 that do disclose were founded on average in 2011 with a median of ¥20,000,000.
Citing this study
You may quote or reproduce these figures, including commercially, provided the measurement date, the frame and the stated limits travel with them. One row per company, with the parsed capital figures, status, company type and the scope-wording flags, is in the data file (< href="../../assets/datasets/registration-field-meaning-2026-08-28.json">JSON). Natural-person names are not stored: the legal representative and shareholder fields appear as presence and counts only.
Archived copies, each with its own DOI, resolving independently of this site: Zenodo · Harvard Dataverse.
A citation with everything it needs:
Currawong, “China registration fields: what capital, status and scope prove”, live registry records for 46 Chinese manufacturers, 28 August 2026.
https://currawongweb.com/verify/china-registration-fields-study/Dataset:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22145056
BibTeX
@dataset{currawong_registration_fields_2026,
author = {Bao L. Zhou},
title = {{What Chinese registry fields guarantee: paid-in capital, registration status and business scope across 46 manufacturers (August 2026)}},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Zenodo},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.22145056},
url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22145056}
}NEXT CHECK
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