Shenzhen Administrative Dispute Lawyer – Administrative Disputes over Real Estate Registration

This article is dedicated to commemorating the 25th anniversary of the promulgation of the Administrative Procedure Law and its first major revision! Actually, there is no road in the beginning; when many people walk on it, a path is formed. Only with a road can there be traffic rules. But we cannot use later traffic rules to fault the first person who took the first step to blaze the trail! — The words of Mr. Lu Xun and the added remarks of the author of this article. 1. Introduction The French sculptor Auguste Rodin once said, "Life is never lacking in beauty, but in the eyes that can discover beauty." All art, whether it be highbrow (refined art) or lowbrow (popular art), originates from life. The reason artists become artists is that they possess discerning eyes capable of discovering beauty in life, and then use various forms of artistic expression to present the beauty of life before us, turning it into spiritual wealth that every ordinary person can enjoy. By the same logic, business opportunities abound everywhere in the world; what is lacking is the eye to discover them. And entrepreneurs, like artists, possess discerning eyes—they can spot business opportunities, dare to take risks, mobilize and organize various resources to develop and exploit those opportunities, thereby creating material wealth for society, enabling every member of the public, whether as producers or consumers, to benefit from them. Figure 1: "The Thinker," one of Rodin's representative sculptures. Guo Moumou, the creator of the "Sea Palace," was born in Rizhao, Shandong Province in 1964. In 1986, he graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang and immediately took up a teaching post in the Art Teaching and Research Section of China Medical University. This was clearly a life trajectory toward becoming an artist or an art educator. But the young Teacher Guo was not happy—or rather, he felt somewhat lost. On the one hand, teaching work without pressure or challenge could hardly ignite his passion; on the other hand, being young, ambitious, and unruly, he failed to win the favor or trust of his superiors. By a stroke of luck, the faculty and staff cafeteria on campus needed renovation, and the school leaders, seeing that he was young and idle, assigned him to oversee the project. Having finally received a chance to prove himself, Guo naturally devoted his heart and soul to it—from design and planning to organizing construction, he attended to every detail personally. After his spirited efforts, the dilapidated, run-down cafeteria of yesteryear was miraculously transformed into an exquisite, tasteful, and upscale restaurant! Faculty and staff who stepped inside were no longer merely satisfying their appetites; they could also enjoy a visual feast of beauty and elegance, and the entire renovation project cost very little—truly delivering both quality and value. Such a result exceeded everyone's expectations and, more importantly, gave Guo Moumou an epiphany: applying his artistic talent to architecture and interior decoration could work wonders. By that time, reform and opening up had become the prevailing trend, and a tide of doing business and creating wealth was surging across society. Inspired and galvanized by this, Guo Moumou began trying, in his spare time, to collaborate with renovation teams to undertake construction and decoration projects. To his surprise, a couple of small trial projects earned him money equivalent to decades of a university teacher's salary! Of course, more important than money was the fact that Guo Moumou had, for the first time, discovered the true value of his own life. In 1988, just two years after taking up his post as a university teacher, Guo Moumou temporarily buried his artistic dreams, resolutely resigned, and plunged into the business world by founding Shenyang Fashion Decoration Engineering Co., Ltd., thereby embarking on the life path of a successful entrepreneur. Yet Guo Moumou always retained the unique perspective and sentimental pursuits of an artist. Starting in 1994, he ventured into the commercial real estate sector; by 1998, he invested 450 million yuan to build the Fashion Underground Street on Taiyuan Street in the commercial heart of Shenyang, dedicating himself to expanding the boundless business opportunities of "underground" space. It was here that the artist's unique perspective first showed its edge. Speaking of Guo Moumou's deep bond with "underground" commercial space, one must begin with his earliest attempt to transform an underground civil air defense (abbreviated as "renfang") project into an underground commercial city. In the 1960s and 1970s, relations between China and the Soviet Union deteriorated from a breakdown to outright hostility, at one point reaching a state of tension and confrontation, with the shadow of nuclear threat hanging over the whole of China. In response to Chairman Mao's strategic directive of "dig tunnels deep, store grain everywhere, and seek no hegemony," numerous large-scale underground civil air defense projects were built across the country—especially in the major cities, where the scale and number of such projects far exceed what young people born in times of peace today could imagine. But after reform and opening up, as China opened its doors and actively developed peaceful, friendly, mutually beneficial, and win-win diplomatic relations with countries around the world, these underground civil air defense projects gradually lost their former combat-readiness function and were abandoned one after another. Guo Moumou keenly perceived the business potential in these abandoned underground projects, contracted them out in their entirety, and after renovation and decoration, transformed the whole underground civil air defense facility into an elegant underground shopping mall. He then leased out the individual shop spaces to self-employed merchants or enterprises, thereby creating a distinctive underground commercial street that became a consumer hotspot and commercial center in the local urban area. The economic returns reaped by Guo Moumou and his relatives and friends were considerable. This was the origin of the underground commercial real estate model that Guo Moumou later replicated and promoted in various cities across the country. Figure 2: This is the entrance to the Fashion Underground Street on Taiyuan Street in Shenyang—the first underground commercial real estate project developed and operated by Guo Moumou and his company to gain nationwide influence. From the sculptures on either side of the entrance, one can readily discern the artistic temperament of the entrepreneur behind the project. From the "underground street" to the "Sea Palace," what is displayed is not only the unique perspective of an entrepreneur trained as an artist in seeking and discovering business opportunities, but also the artistic temperament and romantic sentiment embedded in the very bones of a successful entrepreneur! Of course, dear readers, by no means misunderstand—the road to entrepreneurial success is not as effortless and romantic as described above, nor is it merely the superficial glamour that an outside observer might perceive. In Guo Moumou's own words, during his more than twenty years of business operations, in the first five years he lived every day in a hellish struggle and torment, and more than once entertained this thought: if there were a next life, he would never again be an entrepreneur, because this path was too arduous. But after five years of hard entrepreneurial endeavor, not only did his enterprise get onto the right track, he also learned and internalized the methods of business management. Through the standardized functioning of the professional manager system, he gradually freed himself from day-to-day operations, enabling him to make full use of his unique artistic perspective to seek and discover business opportunities and to provide strategic direction for the company's development. At the same time, he could calmly contemplate life and give full expression to the romantic sentiment and artistic pursuits that had been temporarily suppressed by worldly affairs. (To be continued)