"Chinese Corporate Transparency Is Far Better Than America’s" 27 January 2022

[...] Chinese law mandates the disclosure of a wide range of information from even relatively small private companies, including the names and stakes of investors or owners (making beneficial ownership exceptionally easy to determine), the amount of registered capital, addresses, and a company’s areas of business.

Much of that information is made available online in at least half a dozen major third-party corporate data aggregation platforms. These platforms wolf down public corporate data and combine it with additional information from courts, patent offices, and media coverage, presenting it to subscribing customers and adding their own data-based analysis.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon. China’s countrywide corporate registry database, the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (NECIPS), came online in early 2014. (NECIPS tracks with the state’s efforts to systematize evaluations of commercial regulatory adherence and responsibility, part of a widely misunderstood social credit system that has convinced many foreign commentators that life in China is an extended Black Mirror episode.) [...]

Data for nonpublic companies in the United States, of course, is handled in the respective states, making for a fractured and wildly variant regime. [...]

Much of the recent research connecting companies to forced labor in Xinjiang relies on the ability of researchers to connect the dots among subsidiaries in a way that would be impossible if Chinese companies only disclosed as much information as the average Delaware LLC or Wyoming trust. Some of this is prompting firms, or the Chinese government, to take that information offline—or make it harder for foreigners to access. [...]

Abysmally weak financial disclosure laws at the state level have drawn the ire of other countries as well because such laws can hinder their own ability to investigate money laundering. In response to the Pandora Papers, the European Parliament passed a resolution last year condemning abuses of corporate secrecy, specifically naming South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming, Delaware, and Nevada. [...]