Defective Goods From a Chinese Supplier: How to Prove the Claim

Commercial shipments, not retail purchases

You ordered goods from a company in China. The shipment arrived and it is not what you paid for: the specification is wrong, the units fail on test, the machine is second-hand, or the count is short. The supplier answered your first two messages and has since gone quiet, or offered a discount you consider insulting. You are outside China, you do not read Chinese, and the seller is a name on an invoice. This page is about how a claim for non-conforming goods is proved under Chinese law, in the order the work has to be done.

It is not about retail consumer purchases. If you are an individual who bought a phone, an appliance or a clothing order for your own use, in a Chinese shop or from a consumer marketplace, China runs a free government complaint channel that handles precisely that, and using it is the right answer rather than hiring anyone: see the guide to the 12315 platform. But do not rule yourself out just because a purchase was for your own use. A single high-value item — a vehicle, a boat, a piece of equipment — bought from a Chinese seller who then passed off a used unit as new and will not cooperate is not something a non-binding mediation channel can resolve; that is exactly the kind of claim this page is about.

The line matters for a second reason. China's consumer protection statute — the source of the multiple-damages remedy for seller fraud you may have read about — protects people buying for personal or household use, not purchases made for production, processing or resale. In a commercial sale your remedies come from the contract and the general law of sale.

The first days decide what you can later prove

Most of the weak claims I see were weakened in the first week, before any lawyer was involved, by a reasonable person trying to be constructive. Before you send the supplier anything beyond an acknowledgement that the goods have arrived:

• Photograph the container before you break the seal, with the seal and container numbers legible in the same frame, and keep the seal. If it was intact and the count is short, the shortage points back at loading; if it was broken or replaced, you have a carrier problem as well as a supplier problem.
• Unpack no more than you must. Keep original cartons, labels, batch codes, serial and engine numbers, manuals and any certificates that travelled with the goods. Those codes are what tie the item in your photographs to the item that left the factory.
• Segregate the defective units and leave them alone. Do not repair, rework, re-label, install, resell or scrap them. Each act destroys the thing you would later have to show a court, which will ask why the goods are no longer in the condition you complained about.
• Send nothing back yet, however the request is framed. "Ship the samples to us and we will check them", if granted, moves your entire evidence base to the other side of the dispute.
• Preserve correspondence as data, not pictures. Export email threads with their headers, and export the WeChat or WhatsApp history rather than screenshotting it. Keep the message in which the supplier gave you payment instructions exactly as received — that one often matters more than the contract.

Then answer a question before you accuse anyone: is this the supplier's problem at all? Under FOB, CFR and CIF terms risk passes to you when the goods are loaded at the port of shipment. Crushed cartons, water ingress and handling damage after that point are claims against the carrier or your cargo insurer, under their own much shorter notice deadlines. Non-conformity that already existed at loading — wrong material, wrong dimensions, used goods, missing units — stays with the seller.

The third-party inspection report, and when to commission it

Your own photographs establish that you are unhappy. They rarely establish that the goods breach the contract. That work is done by a report from an independent inspection body, commissioned before or at the same time as your formal notice of non-conformity — not after months of negotiation. A useful report:

• names the standard it measured against, quoting the contract specification, the approved sample, the drawing or an applicable national or industry standard, rather than concluding that quality is "poor";
• records the sampling method and sample size, so the finding extends from the units opened to the consignment;
• photographs defects against identifiable serial, batch or model markings, and names the inspector, the date and the place.

Two points are easy to miss. A report you obtain alone does not bind the seller; it is strong evidence, not an agreed finding. It is far harder to attack if your contract named an inspection body in advance, or if you invited the supplier in writing to attend or appoint its own inspector and recorded that they declined — send that invitation even when you expect silence. And where condition is genuinely contested a Chinese court can order its own appraisal, which requires the goods to still exist as complained of.

Your duty to inspect, and the notice that keeps the claim alive

A buyer under Chinese law is not a passive recipient. You are expected to examine the goods and to speak up, and the consequence of silence is severe: the goods are treated as conforming in quantity and quality, whatever their real condition.

1. Your contract's own inspection or claim window governs first. Read it today. These clauses are often measured in days from arrival at the destination port, and a buyer who negotiates for six weeks and then complains has usually already lost the point. Where an agreed window is unreasonably short, courts have treated it as covering only defects an ordinary examination would reveal — a fallback argument, not a plan.
2. With no agreed window, notify the seller within a reasonable period after you discover, or ought to have discovered, the non-conformity, and in any event within two years of receiving the goods — or within the quality guarantee period, where the goods carry one, which applies instead of the two years.
3. Where the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods applies, the shape is similar: examine within as short a period as is practicable, then give notice specifying the nature of the lack of conformity within a reasonable time, and in any event within two years of handover. China is a contracting state; whether your own country is decides whether the Convention reaches your contract. Check rather than assume — it can govern although neither party ever mentioned it.

Both regimes share one escape hatch: a seller who knew, or ought to have known, that the goods did not conform cannot shelter behind your late notice — the central argument where refurbished goods were sold as new.

What the notice says matters as much as when it is sent. Identify the defect specifically — which items, which characteristic, measured how, against what — rather than reporting "a problem with quality", and reserve your rights expressly. Send it to the contract's notice address by email and by courier, and keep proof of receipt. Proposing to keep the goods for a discount can later be read as acceptance, and paying for new orders while the dispute is open weakens everything you say about the old one.

Three kinds of non-conformity, three different proof problems

"Defective" covers three different disputes, and the evidence problem is different in each.

The goods do not meet the specification

The most common and often the hardest, because the claim is only as good as its benchmark. If the contract says "high quality" or refers to a sample nobody kept, there is nothing to measure against and the case becomes a contest of opinions. Where it carries dimensions, tolerances, materials, test methods or a named standard, a measurement report does the work almost by itself. Retrieve the pre-production or approval sample if one exists; it is often the most valuable object in the file.

Used, refurbished or counterfeit goods sold as new

Here the goods may function, so the breach concerns identity and history rather than performance: manufacture dates, running hours or mileage, serial and engine numbers, replaced components, repainting, plates removed or re-applied. The strongest evidence usually comes from outside the dispute — a letter from the original manufacturer or its authorised dealer confirming what a serial number was built as, when, and to whom it was sold. Because this shades into deception it opens routes a pure quality dispute does not, including rescission and a report to the local market regulator. Treat those as pressure and as evidence; the money still comes from the civil claim.

Short shipment

The simplest arithmetic and the most document-driven proof. It turns on bill of lading and packing list quantities, the seal record, port weight certificates, and whether an independent surveyor counted the units before anyone else touched them. A count by your own staff days after delivery against a broken seal proves very little; a tally taken at devanning by a surveyor, with the intact seal photographed, is close to unanswerable.

The party you paid may not be the party you contracted with

This failure ends more of these cases than any argument about tolerances. Look at three names: the party named in the contract, the party whose chop or signature is on it, and the account holder you actually paid.

They diverge constantly. The contract is with a mainland factory but the invoice asks you to remit to a Hong Kong trading company. The quotation comes from a company whose English trade name appears in no registry. The salesperson sends personal bank details "because the company account is under audit".

The result is a defendant who says it never received your money and a recipient who says it never contracted with you. There are answers — unjust enrichment against the recipient, joining both parties, or arguing that the seller designated the account so payment to it discharged you — but each depends on documents you either kept or did not: the supplier's written instruction naming that account, the invoice, and the chain from your bank to theirs.

Two related points. Only the registered Chinese name and the eighteen-character Unified Social Credit Code identify a Chinese legal person; an English name on a website or a marketplace storefront identifies nothing. A mainland company ordinarily executes a contract with its registered chop, and a chop bearing the registered Chinese name is the execution easiest to prove; a signature by someone with authority also binds the company, and a fingerprint can too — the point is evidential, which mark most reliably ties this company to this contract, not that only a chop will do. Before spending money on a claim, establish that the entity exists and what it holds: how to verify a Chinese company.

Your contract already chose the forum and the governing law

Nothing else in the file is worth analysing until you know where a dispute goes. Read the last page of the contract, not the first.

An arbitration clause and a court jurisdiction clause are alternatives, not companions. If your contract names an arbitration institution — a mainland body, or a Hong Kong or Singapore seat — that is your forum, and a Chinese court will normally decline the case. A clause gesturing at both, or naming an institution that does not exist under the name given, invites a fight about jurisdiction before anyone looks at your goods.

The choice matters most at the end, when the decision has to become money. A foreign arbitral award can be enforced against mainland assets under the New York Convention, to which China is a party, subject to limited grounds of review. A judgment from your own national court generally cannot, unless a bilateral treaty or established reciprocity supports it — which is why a home-court victory against a Chinese supplier is often an expensive document. Where nothing was agreed, the forum is usually a Chinese court at the defendant's domicile: see suing a Chinese company.

Why asset preservation usually decides more than the demand letter

The instinctive order — write a firm letter, threaten proceedings, sue if nothing happens — is often exactly wrong. A Chinese company's bank balance can move in a day, and months separate your first letter from any judgment. A Chinese court can freeze bank accounts, real property, vehicles, equity and payment-platform balances before judgment. Pre-litigation preservation is decided quickly, in urgent cases within forty-eight hours, and if granted you must commence the claim within thirty days or the freeze is released; security is required, and a preservation insurance policy is usually what makes that affordable from abroad. A successful freeze, not the demand letter, is what tends to produce payment: the mechanics are on the supplier dispute page.

Three clocks: notice, limitation, and — if you were deceived — rescission

Up to three sets of deadlines can run at once, and confusing them is common. The notice deadlines above are short and, if missed, defeat the claim on its merits. Separately, a limitation period governs how long you have to start proceedings at all. For contract claims the general limitation period is three years, running not from the contract date but from the point at which you knew or should have known that your right had been infringed and who owed you. A longer period may apply to international sale-of-goods contracts, but whether the older four-year rule survived the Civil Code needs confirming against the current law before anyone relies on it — so do not assume more time than the general three years without checking.

Do not treat the longer period as breathing room: a claim can be well within limitation and already dead because notice was never properly given. Limitation is interrupted by a demand on the debtor, an acknowledgement or promise to pay, or the start of proceedings; a courier-delivered letter with proof of receipt is far better evidence of interruption than an unanswered chat message, so send both. And a judgment or award is not self-executing — enforcement must be applied for within two years of the performance date it sets.

If refurbished goods were passed off as new, or the deception went to the heart of the deal, a third clock may matter. The right to have a contract set aside for fraud is not governed by the ordinary limitation period. It runs on its own short preclusion period, measured from when you discovered the deception, and — unlike limitation — it cannot be interrupted or extended by sending a demand. Miss it and the remedy of rescission is simply gone, even if your damages claim is still in time. The exact length needs confirming against the current provision before you rely on it; if fraud is in play, treat this as the most urgent of the three clocks and raise it with me first.

What a foreign claimant has to produce, and what it costs

A foreign claimant carries a document burden a Chinese claimant does not, and it is the most underestimated part of the timetable. Your company's certificate of incorporation, and the identity and authority of the person signing for it, must be certified for use in China. Since 7 November 2023 the Hague Apostille Convention has been in force for mainland China, so public documents from another Convention state need an apostille rather than consular legalisation; documents from elsewhere still go through the Chinese embassy or consulate. A power of attorney is a private document: it must be notarised first, and the notarial act is what then carries the apostille. Getting that sequence wrong is the commonest cause of a rejected filing.

Ordinary commercial evidence — contracts, invoices, emails, inspection reports — does not carry the same authentication requirement, but everything filed must come with a Chinese translation, and translation priced by volume is the cost that surprises people most. Budget also for the court acceptance fee — a sliding percentage of the amount claimed, paid on filing and normally allocated to the losing party — the preservation fee and its security or insurance premium, and appraisal where condition is contested. Contingency is permitted for money-recovery claims, and capped, but never covers those disbursements.

The cases I turn down, and when not to pursue yours

Being specific about the cases not worth bringing is more useful than a list of services. Do not spend money on a claim before you know whether there is anything to collect.

If the counterparty has been deregistered or had its licence revoked, appears among dishonest judgment debtors with a run of concluded enforcement cases in which no assets were found, or has no paid-in capital and no property, a judgment against it is a piece of paper. That answer comes from a search costing very little, and it belongs before any retainer.

The other limit is arithmetic. The fixed costs above do not shrink as the claim shrinks, so below a certain figure the recovery cannot carry them and no fee structure changes that. For small consignments a platform's dispute process, a card chargeback, or a settlement you find unsatisfying beats a case you win and cannot afford.

I also decline matters where there is no identifiable mainland entity at all — a chat contact, an unregistered trade name, funds sent to a personal account, nothing tying either to a registered company — and requests for a predicted outcome before the file has been read. Sourcing, factory audits and pre-shipment inspection are not legal services; inspection companies do them better and for less.

What a claim worth bringing looks like

Stated positively: the claims worth bringing have an identified mainland counterparty, goods still in the condition complained of, a specification to measure them against, notice given in time, a documented payment trail, and enough at stake to carry costs that do not scale down.

If that describes your shipment, the first step is short and inexpensive: the contract and payment records read in both languages, the counterparty and its assets checked, and a view on whether there is a claim, against whom and in which forum. That review either produces a plan or tells you to stop. Related reading: handling a quality dispute with a Chinese supplier.