The Unified Social Credit Code is the single identifier for legal persons and other organisations in Mainland China, introduced in 2015 under a State Council plan and the national standard GB 32100-2015. It has 18 characters, digits and capital letters other than I, O, Z, S and V: a registration authority code (9 for market regulation), an entity type code (1 for an enterprise), a six-digit administrative division code, a nine-character organisation code and a check character. The code appears on the business licence issued by the market regulator (State Administration for Market Regulation, 国家市场监督管理总局, and its local bureaus) and serves as the company's registration number and its tax identification number.
A company is searched by this code on the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (国家企业信用信息公示系统), which publishes the registration record: name, legal representative, registered capital, business scope, registration authority, status, shareholders and their contributions, key personnel, annual reports, administrative penalties and whether the company is on the abnormal operations list. A code that is structurally valid is not proof of registration; the registry record is.
Why it matters
Mainland company names are not unique across the country and are often translated inconsistently into English. The code is unambiguous, so a KYB request that includes it reaches the right entity first time, and a result that records it can be matched to the licence the customer supplied.
How Fill Easy relates to it
Send the code, or the Chinese name, to agent@fill-easy.com and a Mainland China company search returns the registry record translated into English with the code on every page. Where the request names a company by English name only, the agent asks for the code before it proceeds. See China Cross-Border Data for how the result reaches Hong Kong.