Nine supplier documents, ranked by what they actually prove

The only question that matters

Everything in this trade eventually arrives as a PDF. The PDF is never the evidence — it is a claim about evidence held somewhere else. So the strength of a document has almost nothing to do with the paper and everything to do with whether a second party keeps the same fact and can be asked.

That gives three tiers, and they are not close to each other in value.

1. 1

   The state holds the same fact

   Can be contradicted by a government record

   Business licence · Basic Deposit Account Information · Customs registration · Export licence

2. 2

   A third party holds it — if you ask

   Can be contradicted by the body that issued it

   CCC certificate · ISO 9001 / 13485 · Laboratory test reports · Certificate of origin

3. 3

   Nobody holds it but the supplier

   Can be contradicted by no one

   Proforma invoice · Packing list · Contract · Brochure · Website · Factory photographs

Tier 1 — the state holds the same fact

1. Business licence (营业执照). Carries the registered Chinese name and the 18-character Unified Social Credit Code. The licence itself is easy to reproduce in a graphics program; that does not matter, because the state publishes the same record and every field can be compared against it. A forged licence fails the moment the code is looked up. Verified at: the national enterprise registry.
2. Basic Deposit Account Information (基本存款账户信息). Issued by the supplier’s bank; it replaced the abolished account opening permit in 2019. Its job is to tie a company to a domestic account in its own registered name. Verified by: comparing the account name character-for-character with the licence name — and, for a first payment of consequence, by the bank confirming directly.
3. Customs registration (报关注册登记). Shows the company is registered to make customs declarations in its own right. Useful for separating an exporter from a company that will route your goods through somebody else’s licence. Verified at: the customs credit platform, which holds registration and credit rating.
4. Export licence (出口许可证). Only relevant if your goods are controlled — most are not. Where one is required, its absence stops the shipment at the border regardless of what your contract says. Verified via: the issuing commerce authority against the licence number.

Tier 2 — a third party holds the same fact, if you ask

5. CCC certification (中国强制性产品认证). Mandatory for certain product categories sold in China. Issued by a designated certification body, which can be asked whether a certificate number exists and what factory and product scope it covers.
6. Management-system certificates (ISO 9001, ISO 13485 and similar). These certify a system, not a product, and they certify it for a named legal entity at a named site. Two failures are common and neither requires forgery: the certificate is genuine but belongs to a different entity in the same group, or it is genuine but its scope does not cover what you are buying.
7. Third-party test reports (SGS, Bureau Veritas, Intertek, TÜV and others). A test report describes one sample on one date. It is evidence about that sample, and it becomes evidence about your goods only if the sample was representative and the report is current. Laboratories will confirm a report number.
8. Certificate of origin. Issued by a chamber of commerce or by customs, and checked by the importing customs authority — which makes it comparatively hard to pass off, and makes a false one a much larger problem than a commercial dispute.

The pattern across tier 2: the certificate is trivially easy to fabricate and moderately easy to misrepresent without fabricating anything. Verification is a phone call or a form to the issuer, and almost nobody makes it. That, rather than sophisticated forgery, is where the losses come from.

Tier 3 — nobody holds the same fact

9. Proforma invoice, packing list, contract, brochure, website, factory photographs. All produced by the supplier. No independent party has a copy to compare against. These documents are not worthless — they are where the commitments live, and a contract you can enforce matters enormously — but as evidence of identity or capability they prove exactly nothing.

The one thing tier 3 is excellent for is catching inconsistency. The company name on the invoice, the name on the contract, the name on the bank details and the name on the licence must be one legal entity. When they are not, the mismatch is usually the whole story — and it costs nothing to notice.

All nine, side by side

What forging one costs in China

Worth knowing, because buyers often assume a fake licence is a grey-area commercial trick rather than a crime. Article 280 of the PRC Criminal Law covers forging, altering, trading in, stealing or destroying the documents, certificates and seals of state organs, with a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment, criminal detention, controlled release or deprivation of political rights — rising to three to ten years where the circumstances are serious. Forging the seal of a company, enterprise, institution or people’s organisation is dealt with separately in the same article, with a penalty of up to three years.

A business licence is a certificate issued by a state organ, so a fabricated one sits squarely inside that provision. In practice enforcement follows a complaint and an investigation, which is a slow remedy and not a control. It is a reason the crude forgeries are rarer than people expect — and no reason at all to skip the lookup.

What we are not claiming

The last column of the table above is our judgement, formed from doing this work. There is no official dataset on how hard each document is to forge, nobody publishes forgery statistics by document type, and any article presenting a number here would be inventing it. What each document is, who issues it and where it is verified are facts, and they are sourced. How easily it is faked is an opinion, and it is labelled as one.

That distinction is the same one this whole article is about. A confident presentation is not evidence.

Quick FAQ

Which supplier document is hardest to fake?

The wrong question. Any document can be forged convincingly enough to survive a glance. What separates them is whether an independent party can be asked to contradict the copy you were sent — the state for a business licence or customs registration, an issuing body for a certificate, and nobody at all for an invoice or a brochure. Rank documents by who can contradict them, not by how good the printing looks.

Are ISO 9001 and CE certificates worth asking for?

Yes, but only as a pointer to the body that issued them. The certificate itself is a PDF the supplier controls. Its value is the certificate number and the issuer’s name, because those let you ask the certification body directly whether the certificate exists, covers this legal entity, covers this product scope, and is still current. An unverified certificate is a design exercise.

Is forging a business licence a crime in China?

Yes. Article 280 of the PRC Criminal Law covers forging, altering, trading in, stealing or destroying state organ documents, certificates and seals, with a penalty of up to three years, rising to three to ten years where circumstances are serious. Forging the seal of a company or enterprise is separately covered, with a penalty of up to three years. Enforcement generally follows a complaint, so it is not a substitute for checking.