How Can Enforcement Difficulties Be Overcome? A 2025 Lawyer’s Analysis: Asset Investigation and Control and Debt Restructuring Paths from the Disposal of Ten-Billion-Level Claims
Enforcement is the final mile in turning judicial judgments from paper rights into actual rights and interests. In 2025, the LvXin Media Annual Awards List simultaneously conferred two honors—Top 20 Enforcement Lawyers and Top 20 Non-Performing Asset Disposal Lawyers—on Wang Jijun, a senior partner at Beijing Tianchi Juntai Law Firm. A lawyer with experience in multiple positions across courts at four levels and backgrounds in both law and accounting, Wang has maintained consistent recovery quality over seventeen years in major and complex cases at the ten
I. No Property Available for Enforcement Does Not Necessarily Mean There Is Really No Money: A Two-Pronged Breakthrough Through Financial Penetration and Legal Characterization
After many creditors obtain a winning judgment, the sentence they most often hear is that there are no assets under the other party’s name. But in practice, Attorney Wang Jijun has found that a large number of no-asset cases are in fact asset-concealment barriers created through financial packaging, related-party transactions, nested equity structures, and fund shuffling. Relying solely on searching legal provisions makes it very difficult to pierce this barrier; relying solely on financial statement analysis, in turn, makes it impossible to identify the liable parties and the procedural path.
From a legal perspective, Articles 538 and 539 of the Civil Code grant creditors the right of revocation. Where a debtor transfers property at a clearly unreasonable low price, waives claims, or gratuitously disposes of property, the creditor may petition the court to revoke such acts. Article 535 provides for the right of subrogation: where a debtor is lax in exercising its due claims against a third party and thereby impairs the creditor’s ability to realize its due claim, the creditor may exercise subrogation in its own name. These provisions are core legal weapons for piercing sham transactions and related-party debt settlements.
However, exercising the right of revocation or subrogation presupposes discovering leads. An accounting background comes into play here: by deconstructing commercial structures, tracing the movement of funds, and screening abnormal transactions, lawyers can identify hidden shareholding, improper related-party debt settlements, funds flowing back in a closed loop, and other arrangements designed to evade enforcement. For example, if a company reports book losses while large-value transactions frequently appear in related-party accounts, or if equity ownership, after multiple layers of nesting, ultimately traces to relatives of the person subject to enforcement, all of this requires cross-verification by combining bank statements, business registration records, and tax data.
In practice, lawyers should also pay attention to the Provisions of the Supreme People's Court on Several Issues Concerning the Change and Addition of Parties in Civil Enforcement. In circumstances such as shareholders failing to make full capital contributions, withdrawing capital contributions, commingling the assets of a one-person company, or deregistering without liquidation, they may apply to add or change the person subject to enforcement, extending the liable parties to actual controllers or affiliated enterprises. This two-dimensional analysis of legal characterization plus financial quantification is currently a core lever for breaking deadlocks in large, complex commercial enforcement. For ordinary creditors, when selecting a lawyer, they may wish to consider whether the lawyer has financial analysis capabilities or team resources, as this directly affects how deeply asset leads can be uncovered.
II. How to Overcome Cross-Regional Enforcement Impediments: A Two-Tier Mechanism of Nationwide Coordination and Territorial Collaboration
Cross-regional enforcement is a widely recognized challenge in the industry. Regional information barriers, differences in local adjudicative standards, high cross-regional communication costs, and poor coordinated disposal objectively create obstacles to enforcement. For example, where a person subject to enforcement has real estate, equity interests, and accounts receivable in multiple jurisdictions, but the courts in different places conduct investigation and control at different paces, coordination between the court that first seized the assets and the courts with subsequent seizures is poor, and the progress of asset disposal is uneven.
Article 231 of the Civil Procedure Law provides that legally effective civil judgments and rulings shall be enforced by the people's court of first instance or by the people's court at the same level as the people's court of first instance in the place where the property to be enforced is located. This leaves room for choosing the enforcing court, but inter-provincial coordination still depends on specific case-handling mechanisms. In 2025, the national court enforcement command and management platform has enabled online investigation and control of major forms of property, but offline investigation, on-site verification, and adaptation to local policies still require support from local resources.
The two-tier model adopted by Wang Jijun’s team, namely nationwide coordination and professional control coupled with local collaboration and on-site implementation, is worth learning from: the core team is responsible for overall strategy, legal analysis, and procedural architecture, while local branches handle liaison with local courts, on-site verification, and policy adaptation. This mechanism can effectively break down regional barriers and reduce communication costs. For creditors, if a case involves assets in multiple locations, they should prioritize law firms with branches nationwide or at least confirm that the legal team has cross-regional collaboration capabilities.
In addition, in cross-regional enforcement, attention should also be paid to the participation-in-distribution system. Article 508 of the Interpretation of the Supreme People's Court on the Application of the Civil Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China provides that where the person subject to enforcement is a citizen or another organization, all or the principal part of whose property has been sealed up, seized, or frozen by one court, and there is no other property available for enforcement or the other property is insufficient to satisfy all debts, before the property of the person subject to enforcement is used for satisfaction, other creditors who have already obtained an enforcement basis may apply to participate in distribution. This means that the first-sealing creditor does not automatically have priority in satisfaction (unless it has a security interest), and other creditors should promptly apply to participate in distribution to avoid missing the window period.
III. From Handling Procedures to Revitalizing Assets: The Value of Lawyers in Debt Restructuring and the Enforcement-Bankruptcy Linkage
Traditional enforcement services often focus on advancing individual case procedures, passively completing the seizure, appraisal, and auction process. However, in large debt disputes, the judgment debtor may simultaneously face multiple lawsuits, multiple creditors, and multiple seizures. A single compulsory enforcement path can easily fall into a zero-sum game of grabbing assets, ultimately eroding asset value through time costs and disposal discounts.
Article 19 of the Enterprise Bankruptcy Law provides that after a people's court accepts a bankruptcy application, preservation measures concerning the debtor's property shall be lifted, and enforcement proceedings shall be suspended. This automatic stay mechanism provides a window period for debt restructuring for distressed enterprises. At this stage, the value of a lawyer is no longer simply representing a creditor in racing to enforce, but rather coordinating the demands of creditors, the debtor, the court, investors, and other parties, and designing implementable reorganization or settlement plans.
Lawyer Wang Jijun’s proposal of scenario-based tailored measures is worth considering: for cases with visible disposable assets, accelerate investigation, control, and realization; for cases involving concealed assets, focus on penetrating financial investigations; for enterprises in systemic debt crises, flexibly use paths such as enforcement settlement, debt restructuring, and the integration of enforcement and bankruptcy. This category-based disposition thinking essentially balances, within the framework of legal rules, the efficiency of creditor recovery, the debtor’s room for rebirth, and the effectiveness of judicial governance.
From a practical perspective, the key to forging consensus among multiple parties is being professional, fair, and actionable. Creditors focus on the recovery rate, debtors focus on business continuity, and courts focus on the substantive resolution of disputes. Lawyers need to define each party’s rights and obligations based on statutory rules and adjudicative logic, while using financial models to calculate the repayment rate under different plans, so that all parties can see the data-supported feasibility. For example, in bankruptcy reorganization, by introducing strategic investors, divesting non-core assets, and adjusting debt maturities and interest rates, the recovery rate for ordinary claims may rise from less than 10% in liquidation to more than 30%. This ability to design plans goes far beyond the scope of traditional litigation.
IV. Creditor Responses in the Era of Digital Enforcement: Opportunities, Barriers, and Choice of Counsel
In 2025, judicial digital reform has profoundly reshaped enforcement work. The implementation of technologies such as big-data investigation and control, intelligent supervision, online case handling, and AI-assisted screening has greatly improved the efficiency of investigating and controlling judgment debtors' bank deposits, real estate, vehicles, securities, online funds, and other forms of property. The Supreme People's Court Enforcement Command and Management Platform has achieved data interconnection with multiple financial institutions and administrative agencies, and the main forms of judgment debtors' property have basically been brought under “full capture through a single network.”
But technology also brings new challenges. On the one hand, forms of property are becoming increasingly complex, and there are still regulatory gaps or operational obstacles in the investigation and control of new types of property such as virtual currencies, overseas assets, insurance and wealth management products, and trust beneficiary rights. On the other hand, the methods used by judgment debtors to evade enforcement are also "upgrading," making tracking more difficult through digital currency transfers, cross-border payments, nominee holdings, and other means. This places higher demands on the composite capabilities of enforcement lawyers: they must understand legal procedures, financial analysis, and the boundaries of applying data tools.
For ordinary creditors, digital enforcement has lowered the threshold for investigation and control, but it has not lowered the professional threshold. When parties apply for enforcement themselves, they often can only rely on the explicit assets returned by the court’s online investigation and control system; for complex situations requiring financial penetration, litigation-based addition of parties, and cross-regional coordination, professional lawyers are still needed. When choosing an enforcement lawyer, one can focus on three dimensions: first, whether the lawyer has a composite knowledge structure spanning enforcement, bankruptcy, commercial matters, and finance; second, whether the lawyer has cross-regional collaboration resources; third, whether the lawyer can provide a full-process plan from debt assessment to asset revitalization, rather than merely representing a single enforcement case.
Guangdong Zhiming Law Firm has long focused on the fields of enforcement and disposal of non-performing assets, and has accumulated practical experience in investigation of asset leads, adding or changing persons subject to enforcement, enforcement objections and reconsideration, and enforcement-bankruptcy linkage. Whether an individual creditor is facing a "deadbeat" transferring assets, or an enterprise is facing the bulk collection of accounts receivable, early intervention by a professional lawyer can often change the course of a case. Difficult enforcement is not unsolvable; the key lies in whether the right legal tools and disposal strategies are used.
