You need to find the legal Chinese name of the Chinese company, otherwise, you cannot be sure who is dealing with you and whom you should ask to execute your contract.
This post was first published in CJO GLOBAL, which is committed to providing consulting services in China-related cross-border trade risk management and debt collection.
Moreover, once you find out the legal Chinese name, you can conduct due diligence on the company.
1. Why does the legal Chinese name matter?
All Chinese individuals and enterprises have their legal names in Chinese, and they have no legal or standard names in foreign languages.
In other words, their English names or names in other languages are named by themselves randomly. Usually, it’s hard to back-translate their weird foreign names to their legal Chinese names.
When the Chinese company does not execute the contract, if you don’t know their legal names in Chinese, then you won’t be able to tell the Chinese court whom you are suing. You also cannot tell the Chinese law enforcement agency whom you want to complain about.
Consequently, Chinese courts or government agencies will very likely not accept your case.
2. How to find the legal Chinese name?
(1) You can ask the Chinese company to provide its business license
There are a legal name in Chinese and a unified credit code in its business license.
(2) You can ask the Chinese company to seal the contract with you
To make a contract valid in China, Chinese companies must seal it. The official seal contains a legal name in Chinese and a unified credit code of the company.
(3) You should verify the Chinese legal name
You can check whether the legal name in Chinese on the business license is consistent with that on the official seal. Because a scammer may get a scanned version of the business license of another company, although it is difficult for him to get another company’s seal.
You can check whether the legal name in Chinese is true on ‘China’s National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System’.
This is a website of the State Administration for Market Regulation of China, available at: http://www.gsxt.gov.cn/index.html
If you can find the Chinese name of this company on this website and it is consistent with the information on the business license and official seal, then the name is true.
To learn more about how to use the website, please read ‘How Do I Know if a Chinese Company Is Legitimate and Verify It?’.
The Cross-border Trade Dispute 101 Series (‘CTD 101 Series’) provides an introduction to China-related cross-border trade dispute, and covers the knowledge essential to cross-border trade dispute resolution and debt collection.
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Contributors: Meng Yu 余萌
