Resolving Chinese company names from US CPSC recall notices to registered legal entities (2024-2026 frame, n=310)

Of the whole frame, 91 names (29.4%) returned exactly one candidate, and 52 (16.8%) returned two or more. Only the first of those outcomes identifies a single legal person from the name alone. Among the 143 names that returned anything, 87.4% were reported by the platform as English-name matches, 93.7% had a top candidate carrying an 18-character Unified Social Credit Code, and 5.6% resolved to a Hong Kong registration, which is a different register and carries no such code.</p><p><b>Relation to earlier work.</b> This repeats, on an independent frame and at roughly three times the size, the return-rate measurement in <i>English-name lookup rates for Chinese manufacturers (NHTSA vPIC frame)</i>, doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.33390454, where 61 of 106 names (57.5%) returned a candidate.

The CPSC frame returns at a lower rate (46.1%). The decomposition into unique versus ambiguous resolution is new here and was not measured in the vPIC study. The two studies are not fully interchangeable: the vPIC study additionally tested whether a returned candidate's own recorded English name equalled the input after normalisation, which requires a second per-company call and was not run on this frame.</p><p><b>What this does not establish.</b> A name that returns nothing is not evidence that the company does not exist, that it is not registered, or that the CPSC notice is wrong; it means this platform returned no candidate for that string on the query date.

Equally, a name that returns one candidate is not proof that the candidate is the company CPSC meant. Chinese English-language names are self-supplied and are not part of the business licence, which records a Chinese name only; two companies may romanise identically. Values are a snapshot taken on 2026-09-16 and registrations change.

The data source is a commercial platform, not a direct query of GSXT, the official government portal. No natural-person names or contact details are included in either file.</p><p><b>Files.</b> cpsc-china-name-lookup-2026-09-16.csv gives one row per name on the frame, with the raw CPSC string, the normalised query, the API return code, the number of candidates, the platform-reported match type, and the top candidate's Chinese name, credit code, province and registration status. cpsc-name-resolution-metrics-2026-09-16.csv gives the aggregate metrics in the same layout as the vPIC study, so the two can be read side by side.</p><p>Method, limits and the landing page: currawongweb.com/research/</p>