Measurement record · Six official doors, one mainland host
The same registry gave us six different answers.
“Is China's company registry reachable?” turns out to be the wrong question. On one afternoon, from one machine inside mainland China, six official entry points to the same national system returned 521, 412, 400, 200, 302 and 404. One of them — a provincial entry — answered a plain scripted client normally.
Short answer
Availability is not a property of the system. It is a property of the door you knocked on, and the client you knocked with. Any single-endpoint check — including one that reports the registry as down — is measuring one door out of at least six.
What we measured
Root path only, three rounds each, all from the same host inside mainland China in one session, all sending a Chrome user-agent string. No search was run, no record was retrieved, and no redirect was followed.
| Entry point | Tier | Result | What that shape means |
|---|---|---|---|
| National registry front page | National | 521, 521, 521 | JavaScript challenge — unchanged across five client profiles |
| National alternate entry | National | 412, 405, 405 | Precondition and method refusals, not a challenge page |
| National application entry | National | 400, 400, 400 | Plain bad-request on the root path |
| Shandong provincial entry | Provincial | 200, 200, 200 | Answers a scripted client normally |
| Yunnan provincial entry | Provincial | 302, 302, 302 | Redirect; target not followed or recorded |
| Shanghai regulator service entry | Provincial | 404, 404, 404 | Root path not served; the entry sits deeper |
| Central government portal (control) | — | 200, 200, 200 | Answers every profile we tried, on every round |
Six official doors into one system, and no two behaved the same way. Three of the six returned something a monitoring script would classify as failure, one returned success, one returned a redirect, and one returned a status that usually means the resource does not exist.
The provincial door answers
The result that changes the practical picture is the Shandong provincial entry: 200 on all three rounds, to a plain scripted client. The national front page refused the same class of client on every one of five progressively more browser-like profiles, but this provincial entry did not refuse it at all.
That does not mean provincial entries are a way around anything, and we are not presenting it as one. Different entry points into a federated system are operated separately and expose different things; a 200 on a root path says the door opened, not that the data behind it is equivalent, complete, or that a query would succeed. We requested root paths and stopped there.
What it does mean is narrower and more useful: a statement like “the Chinese registry blocks automated access” is too coarse to be true or false. It depends entirely on which of at least six doors is meant.
When the control host lies to you, and the wrong conclusion we published for an hour
Earlier the same day we recorded that one of our control hosts had returned 403 where a previous run recorded 200, and we wrote that down as the host drifting between dates. That was wrong, and this measurement is what caught it.
Repeating the request five times under each of two client profiles gave a completely stable split: 403 on all five bare requests, 200 on all five that sent nothing more than a Chrome user-agent string. Nothing had drifted. Two runs had simply used different clients, and we had compared them as if they were the same measurement.
The lesson generalises past our own mistake. A control host exists to tell you that your network and your method are working, so that a failure at the target means something. But a control that discriminates on client shape cannot do that job unless you state the shape. “The control returned 200” is not a fact on its own. Any availability panel that omits its client profile — including earlier ones of ours — is under-specified, and we are working back through them.
Of the hosts here, only the central government portal answered 200 to every profile on every round. That is what makes it usable as a control, and it is the one we will keep using.
Why this matters if you are buying from China
Two practical consequences, both about how to read someone else's claim.
When a tool or a vendor tells you an official source is unavailable, the useful question is which entry point they tried and with what client. On this evidence, the honest answer to “can it be reached?” ranges from 200 to 521 depending on the door, and a check pointed at a single one is not measuring the system.
When a supplier check comes back empty, the same caution applies in the other direction. A nil result that came through a door returning 404 or 400 tells you about the door, not about the company.
Our own answer stays the same as it was: the checks are executed China-side by a person, and each delivered line carries the source it came from and the date it was retrieved — including when the answer is that nothing was found. You can see what that produces on a real named company.
Related: five client profiles against the national front page · the original challenge measurement · the eight-source availability panel · how to search the registry once you are in.
Citing this
Quote or reproduce these results freely, including commercially, provided the date (15 August 2026), the vantage (one cloud host inside mainland China), the client profile (a scripted client sending a browser user-agent string) and the stated limits travel with them. On this page the client profile is not a footnote — it is the finding.
Currawong, “Six official entry points to China's company registry, six different answers”, three-round root-path observations from one mainland Chinese host with same-session controls, 15 August 2026.
https://currawongweb.com/verify/china-registry-entry-points/
Machine-readable evidence, every door and round: the observation table (CSV, CC BY). It carries the entry point, its tier, the client profile, the per-round status codes and the two-profile control rows — the page states the finding, the file lets you check it.
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. Browse all measured studies and methods in the research index.
This page reports connectivity observations on root paths. It is not legal advice, it is not a statement about any company, it is not a route around any access control, and it is not a claim about what data any entry point exposes.