China factory data — what we know, and how
Aggregate tables computed from 12,951 company records read out of public Chinese B2B export listings: by province, by category, by cluster, and how often each fact is published at all.
We read 12,951 company records out of public B2B export listings to work out where things are made in China, what each cluster is good at, and how much a listing actually tells you. This section is that data, published as aggregate tables — with the basis for every number, and the limits stated rather than hidden.
What this is not. These records are what companies publish about themselves. We have not audited them, not ordered from them and not visited them. A record here is evidence that a company exports and describes itself in a certain way — nothing more. We say this on every page in this section because a table of numbers is easy to over-read.
Four tables, all recomputable.
Each page below lists its own basis and links a CSV with exactly the table shown. No company names, contact details or shop links are published anywhere in this section.
| Dataset | Size | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Manufacturers by province | 31 provinces | Records, cities and leading categories per province. |
| Manufacturers by category | 29 categories | How the record set is distributed across what is made. |
| What a listing actually discloses | 13 fields | How often each fact is published at all — the honest limit of the data. |
| Industrial belts | 73 clusters | Named manufacturing clusters, matched against the record set. |
Aggregate counts only. Company-level records stay inside our own research process — the record pages themselves are readable but deliberately not offered as a downloadable list.
Where the numbers come from.
Records were read from public B2B export listings read in September 2026. Each record is a company profile as that company publishes it: the products it lists, the city it states, the certifications it names, the staff and floor area it reports.
Geography
City names were normalised against the national administrative division tree, so districts and county-level cities resolve to their parent city. Where the source never stated a city, the record is kept at province level and counted as such.
Categories
Each record is assigned one of 29 categories. This classification is ours, not the source’s — we re-read the product wording rather than trusting the platform’s own category labels, which we measured to be wrong often enough to matter.
Disclosure
For each field we simply count how many records state it. The percentages are the interesting part: they tell you what you can expect a Chinese factory to tell you before you ask.
The same tables as CSV.
English headers, one row per province, category, field or cluster. Free to use; a link back is appreciated and not required.
- Manufacturers by province 31 rows
- Manufacturers by category 29 rows
- What a listing discloses 13 rows
- Industrial belts 73 rows
Cite this page: Golden Era Sourcing, China factory index — aggregate tables, gerasourcing.com/data/, accessed October 2026. The underlying counts are computed from the same record set used across this site.