They have your money and have gone quiet. The record cannot get it back — but it can tell you whether chasing them is worth funding.

1. The question that changes what your next spend is worth

The instinct after a supplier goes quiet is to escalate: a lawyer’s letter, a collection agent, a court filing. Each of those has a price, and each assumes the same unstated thing — that there is something at the other end worth reaching.

Chinese public records answer that assumption directly, through one entry type: terminated-enforcement cases. A terminated-enforcement case means a court already ruled against this company, tried to collect, and closed the case without recovering the money. Someone before you won, and still got nothing.

That is not a prediction about your case. It is a dated fact about theirs, and it belongs in front of the decision rather than after it.

The same records also answer the prior question — is there still a legal entity here at all? A company can be revoked (吊销) and still hold a normal-looking licence copy, and the entity you contracted with may not be the entity whose account you paid. Both are read from the same registration record.

2. The five records that answer “is this worth chasing”

Each entry below carries its own limit. We publish the limit next to the value because a record that is read without its limit is worse than no record — it produces confidence the filing never supported.

• Terminated-enforcement cases — Debts a court already failed to recover — a hard insolvency signal. Limit: Only debts someone already sued over — quiet insolvency with no creditor in court leaves no entry.
• Dishonest debtor and enforcement records — Payment-safety red lines before any deposit. Limit: A clean record is not payment safety — this records disputes that already reached a court or regulator, and a first default has not reached one yet.
• Bankruptcy and restructuring filings — The clearest end-of-road signal a registry can give. Limit: No filing does not mean solvent — a company can be abandoned without anyone filing to wind it up.
• Business abnormalities and administrative penalties — Operating stability over time. Limit: Records what regulators flagged and when — a company can be failing for months before anything appears here.
• High-consumption restriction orders — Personal spending bans on the company or its legal representative. Limit: Absence means no active order on file — it does not clear the person or the company financially.

These five are sold as one pack on the published menu, where every line shows its own price and the official system the record originates in. The registration snapshot — whether the entity exists, its status, scope and address — is free, and on its own it settles a surprising number of these cases.

3. What no record can do

Stating this plainly is the point of the page, not a disclaimer at the bottom of it.

• It cannot recover money. We read records. We do not negotiate, collect, litigate, or contact your supplier on your behalf.
• It cannot prove intent. Nothing in a registry distinguishes a fraud from a factory that took the deposit and then failed. The consequence for you may be identical; the record does not label which it was.
• A clean record is not good news yet. Every one of the five limits above says a version of the same thing: absence of an entry means absence of a filing. A company can be days from collapse with nothing on file.
• It is dated, and it stops being current immediately. A record read today describes today. That is why every line we deliver names its source and the date it was read.

4. What to do with the answer

There are only three shapes the answer takes, and each points somewhere different.

• No such entity, or the entity you paid is not the entity you contracted with. The counterparty question comes before the recovery question. If the account name never matched the registered seller, that is the fact your bank, your payment provider and any lawyer will ask for first — see the bank account check and the payment-entity match.
• The entity exists and its record is clean. You have a counterparty that can be addressed, and the usual escalation path — formal notice, a Chinese lawyer’s letter, platform complaint, arbitration or litigation — has something to aim at. We do not provide any of those; a lawyer qualified in Chinese law does.
• The entity exists and is already carrying terminated enforcement, dishonest-debtor listings or a bankruptcy filing. Then the honest reading is that others reached the same finish line before you and came away empty. That does not make action pointless — it makes the cost of action a decision you are now making with the relevant fact in hand rather than without it.

If you want that answer with the sources and dates attached in a form you can forward, send one supplier name. Person names are withheld by default; unlocking named individuals is a separate, explicit step, because a routine check should not quietly become a file on people.

Boundaries and sources

This page is general information about what public records contain. It is not legal advice, it is not a recovery service, and it does not assess the merits of any dispute. Records reach us through a licensed commercial data platform that republishes filings originating in the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (国家企业信用信息公示系统), China Judgements Online (中国裁判文书网) and the China Enforcement Information Disclosure Network (中国执行信息公开网). We do not query, proxy or scrape those portals from your browser, and we do not work around access controls on them. More on how we handle evidence: the desk and its boundaries.