Study Reveals How China's 160-Million-Record Company Registry Blocks Outside Access

Currawong Web, a supplier verification service, conducted controlled experiments over several months to measure how accessible China's national company registry (NECIPS) is from outside the country. The registry, which holds registration data for every Chinese company, serves JavaScript challenges to visitors that assess browser environment characteristics rather than simply checking cookies. Researchers tested five browser fingerprint configurations, multiple network locations, and various entry points across 106-company and 240-observation datasets, publishing 20 reproducible datasets on Harvard Dataverse under Creative Commons licences. Results showed that client profile configuration mattered more than geographic network location, with a well-configured overseas browser outperforming a poorly configured one inside China. The study also found that eight official certificate registries varied significantly in accessibility, and that the registry appears to operate multiple tiers of trust rather than a simple allow-or-block system.