hina has more detailed and transparent corporate ownership records than almost any country in the world, including the U.S.
These records, covering both public and private companies, are a goldmine of information for investors, multinational corporations and regulators trying to make sense of business risks and global trade flows.
At WireScreen, the company I co-founded, we specialize in collecting and analyzing these records. We realized that by structuring this data, we could unlock powerful insights into China’s vast corporate landscape—insights that are critical to understanding the forces shaping global commerce.
The origins of WireScreen trace back to my time as a reporter at The New York Times. In investigating the ownership structure of the HNA Group—a Chinese conglomerate that had spent billions acquiring U.S. hotels, real estate, and tech firms—I followed the money trail through Chinese corporate filings.
Those records helped me connect individuals in China to offshore accounts, hidden assets, and investments stretching from Ireland and the Cayman Islands to California and New York City.
Few take the time to analyze China’s corporate records, and that’s surprising because they’ve been digitized, making it easier than it used to be to do research on any company, even the smallest businesses.
The records include details about the business dealings of China’s political elite, as I uncovered in 2012 when reporting on the secret holdings of then-Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s family but also on the country’s trailblazing entrepreneurs who are innovating with drones, electric vehicles, and AI. They expose how money moves across borders, from offshore tax havens to Singapore, Vietnam, and Latin America.
This data is more valuable than ever because “Great Power Competition” between the U.S. and China is reshaping the business landscape and driving major policy shifts in Washington, from export controls on semiconductors to new trade and investment restrictions.
Chinese corporate filings also provide valuable insights even into U.S. companies, which must register to operate there. For example, companies like Microsoft and Apple have to disclose their joint venture partners and list their investments and affiliates in China. The WireScreen database includes filings from thousands of U.S. companies, translated into English, of course.
In the U.S., investors look to SEC filings as their source of truth.
Those same investors would probably be surprised to find the extraordinary amount of detail contained in open source corporate records in China.
