Zhou Qiang, president and chief justice of China’s Supreme People’s Court (SPC), pointed out on March 9 that this year is decisive in solving execution difficulties, stirring discussion among deputies to the National People’s Congress (NPC).

Execution work is not rough work, but rather an art, according to NPC delegate Wang Shujiang. Wang said that execution work needs high-level talents and it’s necessary to improve the professional quality of staff who enforce court judgments.

In 2017, court at all levels accepted a total of 22.25 million execution cases, of which 21 million were concluded, generating 7,000 billion yuan ($1,107 billion) in recovered court-ordered payments.

Regarding the execution difficulties, Li Li, another NPC deputy said that the difficulty in searching people and property and liquidating property is a bottleneck hindering execution work.

The SPC work report shows that the SPC has set up an online execution surveillance system with more than ten ministries and agencies such as the Ministry of Public Security and the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) to investigate and control people subject to enforcement and to identify and enable seizure of their property by online and automatic means.

The court also inquired into 39.1 million cases and froze 202.1 billion yuan which highly improved execution efficiency. And to overcome difficulties such as liquidating property, the court implemented online judicial auctions and opened the auction process to the public.

Wu Xielin, an NPC deputy and president of Fujian Higher People’s Court, said that explicit resistance to executions is decreasing but the evasive means are reinvented, bringing challenges to the execution work of the court.

Kou Fang, an NPC delegate and president of Jilin Higher People’s Court, echoed Wu, saying that due to an unsound social credit system, people subject to execution hide themselves from place to place and even move to other locations with their family to dodge a creditor.