.cn domain names

What .cn is

.cn is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) of the People's Republic of China, mapped to the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code CN. IANA records an original delegation date of 28 November 1990 and lists the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), Beijing, as the sponsoring organisation. CNNIC was established in June 1997, is a public institution affiliated with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), and runs the registry itself, with no outsourced back-end and no change of operator on record.

That affiliation explains most of what follows. .cn policy is downstream of Chinese telecommunications and content regulation, principally MIIT's Internet Domain Name Management Measures, effective 1 November 2017, so what buyers experience as an obstructive registrar is usually a statutory obligation imposed on CNNIC and on MIIT-licensed registrars.

The namespace was categorised before it was flat: registration was originally under com.cn, net.cn, org.cn and the regional zones, and direct second-level registration opened later, widely reported as March 2003 though not confirmed by CNNIC. Those three generic zones remain open to the public, while edu.cn, gov.cn, ac.cn and mil.cn are restricted, alongside 34 administrative-region zones such as bj.cn and sh.cn. .cn is the largest ccTLD in the world: 19,562,007 domains as at 29 August 2024, with no verified 2025 or 2026 total published.

Who can register .cn

Eligibility is close to open. Article 18 of CNNIC's Implementing Rules, effective 18 June 2019, allows natural persons, legal persons and unincorporated organisations to register, with no nationality, residency or local-presence requirement. Anyone told that foreigners cannot hold .cn is reading pre-2012 information: individual registration was effectively stopped in the December 2009 clampdown and restored by an amendment announced on 28 May 2012.

The gate that matters is real-name verification: mandatory, enforced, and separate from registering. MIIT's 2017 Measures require registrars to obtain real, accurate and complete identity information, require registry and registrar alike to check it, and bar registration where an applicant refuses to correct inaccurate data (Article 30); Article 43 provides that a domain shall be cancelled where false information was submitted. CNNIC's rules require colour electronic copies of identification materials, and since it publishes no English-language registrant guide, the practical requirements come from accredited registrars:

• Individuals outside mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan: a passport, generally the only accepted document. Driving licences are refused.
• Individuals in mainland China: resident ID card, Foreign Permanent Resident ID Card, or officer's identity card.
• Individuals in Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan: residence permit, Home Return or Taiwan Compatriot Permit, or passport.
• Organisations outside China: an overseas organisation certificate, in practice the certificate of incorporation, plus the responsible person's ID.
• Organisations in mainland China: business licence, Organization Code Certificate, or institutional registration certificate.

Format rules are the usual point of failure: a colour image, unaltered, front side only, in .jpg, typically under a megabyte, with the registrant name matching the document exactly. Names containing umlauts or accents cannot be processed at all, and registrars commonly allow only about eight days to submit.

Failure has consequences. An unverified domain goes to serverHold and stops resolving, cannot be renewed, and is eventually deleted. Nor is verification a one-time gate: since 1 August 2022 CNNIC has run random audits across existing .cn domains, so a name that has resolved for years can be pulled for re-verification and suspended, particularly where the original document has expired. CNNIC's stated review target is one working day; treat it as a target, not an expected end-to-end time.

What .cn costs to own

.cn is structurally one of the cheapest mainstream ccTLDs, deliberately so: adoption has been treated as state policy rather than as a profit centre. Registry pricing is set in renminbi, so registrars elsewhere carry currency exposure and retail prices can move with no registry change. None of the gTLD protections apply — no price caps, no six-months-notice obligation, no contractual renewal-price protection — and no CNNIC wholesale change has been announced for 2025 or 2026.

The gap between first-year and renewal pricing is unusually wide in practice, with aggressive introductory offers and renewals at multiples of them, so check the renewal price before you register. Category zones are priced near the direct second level, and restoring a deleted domain costs substantially more than a renewal. The real expenditure on a .cn project is not the domain: ICP filing, the mainland entity needed to obtain it, and mainland hosting dwarf it.

Registration terms, renewals, and transfers

Terms run from one to ten years, and a renewal may not push expiry more than ten years out. Unverified domains cannot be renewed at all, which turns a verification failure into eventual loss of the name. The expiry lifecycle is also shorter than gTLD habit suggests: registrar documentation describes a brief post-expiry window and a redemption period of around fifteen days, roughly half the thirty-day Redemption Grace Period (the window after deletion in which only the former registrant may restore a name) that gTLD buyers expect.

Transfers use an EPP authorisation code of six to sixteen characters from the losing registrar, but CNNIC sets the framework itself and it is stricter than ICANN's. A .cn domain cannot be transferred within sixty days of registration, cannot be transferred while under a dispute or litigation hold, and cannot be transferred if it expires within fifteen days — a rule with no ICANN analogue. Renew first, then transfer. Registrars must also complete transfer review within three working days.

Changing the registrant is a separate manual process, and the incoming holder's documents are verified afresh: a change of registrant re-triggers real-name verification. A domain on serverHold can be neither renewed nor transferred out, so a verification failure locks both exits at once.

WHOIS, RDAP, and privacy

Registry WHOIS is whois.cnnic.cn. There is no publicly discoverable RDAP service — .cn is absent from the IANA RDAP bootstrap file and rdap.cnnic.cn does not resolve — so treat .cn as WHOIS-only and expect RDAP tooling to fail on it.

.cn is a thick registry: CNNIC holds registrant data centrally and by statute must have verified it. Two questions have to be kept apart. Concealment from the public is partly achievable, since current WHOIS output is heavily reduced and personal details are generally not exposed, though this varies by registrar and has changed over time — check a live lookup rather than a policy summary. Concealment from the registry is impossible, because verification means CNNIC holds your government identity document by design. You may be able to hide from the public; you cannot hide from the registry, and that is the purpose of the system rather than a flaw in it.

Disputes run under CNNIC's own ccTLD dispute policy, not the UDRP. The zone is signed for DNSSEC on algorithm 8 (RSASHA256). Chinese-character labels work at the second level, but the Chinese-script top-level domains are separate TLDs rather than aliases — a .cn registration does not carry them.

Who .cn suits, and who should avoid it

For a business genuinely operating in China, .cn is the correct extension and the compliance burden is a cost of doing business. It suits:

• Companies with a legal presence in mainland China — a wholly foreign-owned enterprise, joint venture, branch or representative office. With the entity in place, .cn plus an ICP filing is the normal way to run a Chinese website.
• Operations that need speed inside China, since mainland hosting behind a filing is far faster for Chinese users.
• Brands registering defensively — provided verification is completed even on names never used, because an unverified defensive registration is a delayed loss.
• Projects built for Chinese-speaking users, where .cn reads as native in a way .com does not.

It is the wrong choice for a business that merely wants to look Chinese. Avoid it if you are:

• Unwilling to submit a passport or company certificate to a state-affiliated registry. That is the entry price and there is no workaround.
• A registrant whose name carries accented characters with no alternative documentation.
• A domain investor, since every name needs individual verification and every registrant change repeats it.
• Expecting the domain to deliver a China-hosted website, because without a mainland entity there is no filing, and without a filing no mainland hosting.
• Intolerant of regulatory change, or planning content that would be politically sensitive in China. No registry agreement here gives registrants notice rights.

Common mistakes with .cn

Treating registration as the end of the process. It is the beginning. Verification is a separate mandatory step with a short deadline; miss it and the domain stops resolving, cannot be renewed, and is eventually deleted.

Confusing real-name verification with ICP filing. Verification concerns who you are and is run by CNNIC; ICP filing concerns where your server is and is run by MIIT through provincial authorities. You always need verification. You need a filing only if you host in mainland China, which requires a mainland entity most foreign registrants do not have.

Registering at a registrar that is not MIIT-accredited. The filing process requires the domain to sit with an accredited registrar, so a domain bought elsewhere cannot support a China-hosted site. Fixing that means a transfer, and any registrant change means fresh verification.

Leaving a renewal or transfer to the last fortnight, given that .cn blocks transfers on domains expiring within fifteen days and the redemption window is shorter than the thirty days gTLD registrants expect.

The ICP filing: why a .cn domain is not permission to publish in China

ICP filing — the record known in Chinese as beian — is not a domain matter but a hosting matter, administered by MIIT through provincial authorities and required to serve a website from infrastructure physically located in mainland China, whatever extension it uses. The trigger is hosting location, not the TLD: a .com hosted in Shanghai needs a filing, and a .cn hosted in Frankfurt does not. You can own and use a .cn domain with no filing at all provided you host outside the mainland, as many foreign brands do; the trade-off is latency and reliability, since traffic then crosses the border filtering infrastructure.

Two credentials are conflated constantly. The ICP filing produces an ICP number, covers non-commercial and informational sites, and is available to representative offices, wholly foreign-owned enterprises and joint ventures. The ICP licence is a harder credential for commercial sites that sell goods or services, presupposes the filing, and is generally open only to local companies and joint ventures with less than 50 per cent foreign ownership. Can a foreign entity obtain either directly, as a foreign entity? Effectively no: the filing must be made by a mainland legal presence, and Alibaba Cloud's guidance is explicit that an enterprise with no registered branch in the mainland must first obtain a representative-office registration certificate.

Four things must be true before filing: the domain sits with an MIIT-accredited registrar, which is why registering .cn elsewhere creates a dead end; real-name verification is complete; you hold proof of ownership and the identity and authentication documents; and you have mainland hosting, since the filing is tied to the hosting resource and submitted through the host. Timelines are commonly quoted at four to eight weeks and vary by province. Without a number, mainland hosts are instructed to shut the site down, often with no notice and no appeal, and sites operating in the mainland must display their ICP number on the homepage.

One repeated claim deserves correction. The 2017 Measures say websites accessed within the territory should use domain names registered within the territory, which much English-language coverage read as foreign-registered domains being blocked in China. That has not been borne out: Article 37 of the official translation prohibits domain-name aliasing for the content categories in Article 28, and maliciously directing resolution to other persons' IP addresses.