Which Chinese registries show vape factory ownership?

The national enterprise credit publicity system (GSXT) is the entity of record: legal name, unified social credit code, legal representative, shareholders, registered capital, address, business scope and abnormal-operation flags. It is the spine, and it is already the first stop in this dataset's source registry. What it does not surface on the search page is the part that answers the ownership question properly.

That part is the annual report (年报), filed between 1 January and 30 June each year, which carries 从业人数, 单位参保人数, social-insurance headcount, 缴费基数, 资产总额, 负债总额, 营业总收入, 利润总额, 纳税总额 and 对外担保, plus the chattel-mortgage and equity-pledge registers (动产抵押登记 and 股权出质登记). An equity pledge names who has taken security over whose shares. Social-insurance headcount is the cheapest test in the whole set for telling a three-hundred-worker plant from a one-room trading desk.

A status code in that table is an operational measurement, not a verdict on the source. A 412 is the standard Chinese-government anti-bot response and generally clears through a real browser; a 403 refuses a non-browser client outright; a code of 000 means the host did not resolve from a US vantage point at all, which is a geography problem rather than a dead source.

Through personal names. An exporter on a bill of lading is frequently a Hong Kong entity with no plant, and it shares no identifier with the factory. Its annual return, bought for HK$22 through the Companies Registry's Company Particulars Search, names its directors and shareholders of record, and the same person often appears as 法定代表人 or 股东 on the mainland company's registry record. No other source in this research gives a shared identifier across that boundary at single-digit dollars per lookup.

Two caveats belong on the page every time this bridge is used. The names are nominees of record, not necessarily the people who control the company, because Hong Kong's beneficial-ownership register is not public. And the system itself changed: e-Services replaced ICRIS and the Cyber Search Centre on 27 December 2023, so anything still pointing at an ICRIS URL is stale.

Taiwan's MOEA business-registration query is, on the data it returns, the best free registry in the whole set, 負責人姓名, directors and supervisors, capital, address and a searchable factory registration number, with no registration required. It refused a plain client from this network, so the constraint is access rather than cost.

Guangdong's 专精特新 small-and-medium-enterprise rosters come out as bulk `.xls` attachments, 2,257 firms in the 2025 batch and 4,985 in the re-review file, with eight historical batches behind them, which is the best bulk-to-effort ratio anywhere in this research. High-tech enterprise certification notices publish company-name lists three times a year as PDF and XLS attachments, and high-tech status is a tax-and-R&D qualification a shell trading company does not hold.

The asymmetric find is narrower and better. Shenzhen's Emergency Management Bureau publishes industrial-and-trade safety-standardisation enterprise lists as batch PDFs that carry 区域, 街道, 企业名称 and 所属行业, district, sub-district, company name and industry tag. Verified sample rows include a disposable-vape OEM in Songgang and a firm categorised under 烟草 in Shajing. That is a street-level factory universe for the sub-districts where this hardware is actually made, published in a format almost nobody parses.

Those lists qualify a company; they do not link it to a brand. For the records that do, see how to tell a factory from a trading company and what a production licence does and does not prove.

Four of these get proposed often enough to be worth recording as closed.

Questions people ask

Is there one Chinese registry that shows who owns a vape factory?

No. The national enterprise credit publicity system gives the legal entity and its shareholders of record, but beneficial ownership is not published in China, Hong Kong or Macau. Ownership has to be assembled from the entity record, the annual report, an offshore registry and the trademark assignment gazette.

Can you download Chinese company records in bulk?

Only some. Guangdong's specialised-SME rosters and the high-tech certification notices come out as XLS and PDF attachments, and the NVOCC filing list is one HTML table per month. The enterprise registry's annual reports have no legitimate bulk path, the search is page-by-page behind a slider CAPTCHA.

What does a 412 status mean on a Chinese government site?

It is the standard Chinese-government anti-bot precondition failure, and it usually clears through a real browser that completes the JavaScript cookie handshake. It does not mean the source is dead or closed to the public.

Sources

Every register, statute, agency or document the claims above rest on. Reachability notes are measurements taken from a United States vantage point and describe our access, not the standing of the source.

1. 国家企业信用信息公示系统 (GSXT)Entity record; the annual report adds social-insurance headcount, assets and equity pledges
2. Hong Kong Companies Registry e-ServicesReplaced ICRIS and the Cyber Search Centre on 27 December 2023
3. 經濟部商工登記公示資料查詢服務 (Taiwan MOEA)Directors, capital and address in one free query; refused a plain client from a US egress
4. 广东省工业和信息化厅 专精特新中小企业名单Bulk XLS: 2,257 firms in the 2025 batch, 4,985 in the re-review file
5. 深圳市应急管理局 工贸行业安全生产标准化企业名单Batch PDFs carrying district, sub-district, company name and industry tag
6. 商标转让公告 (CNIPA trademark assignment gazette)Assignment approval is gazetted; the assignee acquires rights from the announcement date
7. 对外贸易经营者备案登记, abolishedArticle 9 of the Foreign Trade Law deleted 30 December 2022; enterprises no longer file

Where this guide came from

Written from these passes of the internal source research, so a claim on this page can be traced back to the pass that produced it.

• research/sources-china.md, Source table §Government open data; §Offshore exporter fronting
• research/sources-china.md, Dead ends, chased and rejected, items 1, 3, 6, 8
• research/sources-china.md, Explicit gaps, things I could not verify, item 4