Buyer questionAnswered from the China side
Does your Chinese supplier need an export licence? The answer changed, and most advice online did not.
The standard instruction a buyer gets is: pull the business licence, look at the registered business scope, and check whether it contains import-export wording — because without it the supplier “cannot legally export”. That instruction described a filing regime that China deleted on 30 December 2022. The Foreign Trade Law was then rewritten in full and the new text took effect on 1 March 2026. Under it, a foreign trade operator is simply a lawfully registered business entity. This page sets out what the current rule actually is, what business scope still tells you, and which check is worth doing instead.
EXPORT RIGHTS / 01
The useful question is not “may they export”. It is “who is the exporter”.
Once the licence question is answered honestly it stops being interesting, because the answer is almost always yes. The question that carries the money is which legal entity ships, which invoices, and which receives payment — and whether those are the same company.
What changed, in two dates
30 December 2022. The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress amended the Foreign Trade Law. The operative sentence of that decision is one line: delete Article 9. Article 9 was the provision requiring foreign trade operators to complete record filing and registration with the competent foreign trade department. With it went the filing certificate that buyers were once told to ask for.
1 March 2026. The law was revised a second time on 27 December 2025 and republished as a whole. Article 11 of the current text defines a foreign trade operator as an individual or organisation that has completed business-entity registration or other practice formalities in accordance with law and engages in foreign trade activities. There is no separate qualification to obtain. A company that is lawfully registered is within the definition.
This is why the advice you will find in most English-language sourcing guides is out of date rather than wrong-headed. It was accurate before 2023 and nobody went back to revise it. If a checklist tells you to demand a foreign trade operator registration certificate, that checklist has not been updated in over three years.
What the registered business scope still tells you
It is still worth reading. It just answers a different question than buyers think.
Business scope (经营范围) is the registered range of activities a company declared when it was set up. It is a drafting decision, and it describes the market the company was built for. It is not a permission slip for export, and since the 2022 amendment it has not been a legal wall.
Our own census of 264 manufacturers gives a sense of the spread. These are companies from three official provincial excerpts of the MIIT Little Giant list — state-recognised specialist manufacturers, which is to say the audited end of the supplier pool rather than the risky end. 197 of the 264 (74.6%) carry import-export wording in their registered scope. The other 67 (25.4%) carry none at all.
A quarter of a group of nationally recognised factories was drafted for the domestic market. That is not a finding about legality. It is a finding about structure: those companies typically sell through an affiliated trading entity, which is why the factory makes the goods and a company you have never heard of issues the invoice. The full census, the three excerpts and what the numbers cannot show.
What actually has to be true for goods to leave China
Three things, and only the first is universal:
Customs registration. Whichever entity declares the goods must be registered with China Customs and hold a customs registration code, and in practice an Electronic Port credential to file declarations. This survived the 2022 amendment untouched. It attaches to the declaring entity, which is frequently a trading company or a freight forwarder acting as agent — not the factory that made your goods.
Product-specific licensing, where the goods are controlled. Dual-use items, certain chemicals, and goods under quota or state trading arrangements sit in separate regimes with their own permits. This is genuinely a licence question, and it is about the product, not the company. If your goods fall in one of these categories, ask your freight forwarder and your own import authority; it is outside what a registry check can answer.
Export tax refund registration, if the price assumed one. Not a permission to export, but it shapes who wants to be the exporter of record, because the refund follows the declaring entity. It is one reason a factory may prefer to route your order through an affiliate even when its own scope would have allowed a direct shipment.
The question that actually matters: do the names match
Because almost any registered company may export, the licence question no longer separates a sound supplier from an unsound one. What separates them is whether the entities in your transaction line up, and whether you were told about it before the invoice or after.
Four names are worth writing down side by side:
The entity on your contract. The entity issuing the invoice. The account holder you are asked to pay. The shipper on the bill of lading.
A legitimate factory-plus-affiliate structure will explain a mismatch openly, in writing, before you are asked to pay. A payment-diversion attempt produces exactly the same mismatch, discovered at the same moment, with an explanation that arrives only after you ask. From the buyer’s seat the two look identical, which is the whole difficulty — and the reason to settle it in writing while it is still a question about paperwork rather than about money.
There is a second reason to care that has nothing to do with fraud. Some importing authorities expect the party on the contract, the party on the commercial invoice and the party receiving payment to be the same, and a mismatch can create a customs or tax problem in your country long after the goods arrived without incident. Whether that applies to you is a question for your own customs broker.
Related checks: confirm the beneficiary against the registered entity, what the commercial invoice has to carry, and what a bill of lading does and does not prove.
What we do not do
We do not issue or verify export licences. No such general licence exists for ordinary goods, and for controlled goods the permit sits with the exporter and the relevant regulator, not in any record we can retrieve.
We do not advise on whether your product is export-controlled or import-restricted. That is a classification question in both jurisdictions, and it belongs with your customs broker and the relevant authority.
We do not give legal or tax advice, and nothing here decides whether a particular contract or payment route is enforceable or compliant in your country.
What we do is narrower and checkable: retrieve the public registration record for a named Chinese entity — status, unified social credit code, registered scope, legal representative, former names — and report it with its source and retrieval date, including saying plainly when something could not be read.
Not legal advice. Legal position stated as at 12 August 2026 from the published text of the Foreign Trade Law; the law changes and this page carries a date for that reason.