People who are disappointed in the real life and feel lost about the future tend to be reminiscent of their "good old days" and past achievements, but those who are willing to reveal their real and ordinary life experience are the real winners. Wang Desheng is one of the latter. When being interviewed, he talked about his poor family background and eventful career experience with perfect ease, composure, confidence and optimism.

A lawyer dream ignited by a movie

Wang Desheng was born in 1976, a time when the countryside was extremely poor. He was born in a poor family with generations of farmers, a family that could only cook meat at the end of the year. Having enough to eat was a luxury for the young Wang Desheng. His clothes and shoes were all hand-made by his mother, and he could still remember his mother spinning yarn, weaving cloth and making clothes under the oil lamp. When survival was on the line, education was not important. When Wang was little, his teachers were not very well educated. Their way of thinking and their way of teaching the students were very simple, but Wang still performed greatly in such an environment and was always No.1 in all exams, which laid a solid foundation for him to leave the rural village through study in the future. His family left a critical impact on Wang Desheng's growth. His grandfather was a Xiu Cai (a county-level scholar in ancient times), his family was very supportive of study, and his parents insisted on sending him to school no matter how hard they had to work. Of the four children in the family, Wang Desheng's elder brother and sister both went to college, which was an encouragement for him. He said he wanted to change his life and not become a farmer because the harvest in summer and autumn was truly exhausting, and he remembered vividly how the skin tickled and itched when he peeled corns in summer.

In the remote village where all information came from neighbors, relatives and friends, a movie that he watched accidentally opened a new window in his life and ignited his dream of becoming a lawyer. When Wang Desheng was in high school, he watched a Hong Kong movie The Truth and thought lawyer was very cool and able to do justice, so he decided to major in law when he was admitted by Zhongnan University of Economics.

Law was his own choice, but he chose Zhongnan University of Economics because of his elder brother, who majored in finance and suggested him apply for a college focused on economics. To accommodate both law and finance, studying law at Zhongnan University of Economics was his best choice, and this choice also connected him with fiscal and tax.

Connection with fiscal and tax

Law was a relatively weak subject at Zhongnan University of Economics, but it was great at accounting and tax, having doctoral station and being a national key subject. In an atmosphere focused on fiscal and tax, the university opened minor courses in that area, which was how Wang Desheng began to access fiscal and tax knowledge. As he recalled, he went to financial and accounting classes at night, and the basic knowledge about economics and accounting he learnt there aroused his interests in this area. He was always grateful for his alma mater for this.

When Wang graduated from college in 1997, half of the 42 students in his class joined the legal or risk control department in the financial industry and very few chose the public security system. He was faced with two options: either he went back to Henan's Luohe to be a judge at an intermediate court, or he stayed in Wuhan and became a teacher at a fiscal junior college subordinate to the municipal fiscal bureau. Wang said he wanted to be a judge very much at that time, but he instinctively felt that staying in the big city would be more helpful for his future career. Becoming a teacher was just an expedient. He knew very well that it wouldn't be his destination.

At the fiscal junior college, many of his colleagues specialized in fiscal and tax work, which made him interested again. Some young colleagues took the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) exam, and Wang Desheng joined their discussions given such a strong studying atmosphere. But that wasn't the only reason why he took the exam. According to him, he had a concept then that the wider scope of knowledge he had, the more useful information he could get from the outside world.

Wang Desheng took the CPA exam for the first time in 2000 and passed three subjects, which was a great encouragement for him. He said, "I never received any standard training, and didn't have much time to read the professional books in my spare time", but he still passed, which was good experience for him. He passed the bar in 1998, and he thought the CPA exam was much harder.

It was also in 2000 that Wang decided to resign from the junior college, where he had worked as a teacher for three years. He liked the job, but at that time, being a teacher was a big challenge for him because students at the junior college were mostly aged 16-20, most of whom were from incomplete families with poor parenting and bad habits. Wang himself was only 21 years old then fresh from college, so he didn't have much more life experience or judgment than his students, hit a ceiling in the communication with them, and couldn't find better ways to give them life guidance. This made him painful and put a lot of pressure on him. "I was under so much pressure that if I had to teach on Monday, I felt extremely worried on Sunday night. I felt anxious about what was going to happen the next day, and I had no experience to tell me how to deal with this. That's what made me worry," said Wang. Under such circumstances, he needed to make a new choice, both for his students and for himself.

Because he was young, Wang Desheng chose to stop his teaching career; also because he was young, he had a lot of time to try and experience new things. Since he majored in law and already passed the bar, becoming a lawyer was a natural choice, but there was no corporate law firm in Wuhan at that time, and the law firms were all affiliated to some organization. A master took several apprentices, there was no training, no sense of belonging, no prospect, and the salary was low too. Therefore, Wang Desheng left the law firm two or three months later.

Opportunities favor the prepared. The WUYIGE Certified Public Accountants LLP (DAXIN), which ranked first in Hubei province, was recruiting at that time, so Wang Desheng, who already passed four subjects of the CPA exam, applied for the job and was luckily accepted. He described the experience at Daxin as "pleasant". The company offered him systematic training, senior accountants gave him detailed instructions every step of the way, and the colleagues worked as a team. Wang learnt a lot at Daxin. During the three years he was there from 2000 to 2003, he was focused on auditing for listed companies. "I had to travel for business frequently and came home only a few times a year. Sometimes when I got back, I couldn't find my rented apartment."

Lawyer dream revisited

Speaking of his resignation from Daxin, Wang Desheng said, "I still wanted to realize my lawyer dream and I was able to do that at that time. This includes two things. First, I was economically capable. While working at Daxin, I was so busy that I didn't have time to spend money, so all my salaries were saved. Second, I thought I had enough life experience to be a lawyer." In his opinion, Today Law Firm was highly reputed in Hubei then and the founder was his college teacher, so he naturally became a member of Today Law Firm, officially embarking on a new journey to achieving his lawyer dream.

When Wang Desheng first became a paralegal at Today Law Firm, he felt immense pressure. "Lawyers help the clients solve problems, and business clients are all very smart bosses and elites with far more complicated social experience than you. But they need you to help them solve problems they cannot. That is heavy pressure." Civilian clients also gave him pressure. He wasn't even married, so problems like child raising, support for elders and domestic violence in divorce cases was very challenging for him. But this time he decided to face and fix the problem. "I need to know where the pressure comes from in order to find the right way to deal with it," said Wang Desheng. He knew that many senior lawyers that he admired experienced such pressure and pain, but getting through it, he would be like a cocoon turning into a butterfly. He also believed that he would become more mature as he gathered more experience over time.

Wang Desheng turned pressure into excitement and motivation. He reflected on every case and client and kept journals thereof. "If I had a case to go to court, I might not be able to sleep at night. I would keep practicing it in my head and would feel excited the next day if a question was asked that I already thought about," said Wang. In this process, he felt his own progress and was getting ever closer to his lawyer dream.

Wang Desheng worked at Today Law Firm for ten years. "The longer I stayed, the more I believed this profession suited me very much, and the more I practiced law, the more I liked the challenges." But the long years at a traditional law firm set him thinking about the bottlenecks he encountered at work. In Wang Desheng's opinion, a lawyer's energy and experience was limited, so he couldn't satisfy all the client's requirements for legal service perfectly, and division of work was necessary in order not to affect the service quality. On the other hand, new members to the company had to start as apprentice, assistant or paralegal, and they could see no future, no prospect and had no sense of belonging. Wang said, "everyone needs a sense of belonging. I had been a lawyer for ten years by the second half of 2014, and income was not that important for me anymore. I felt I couldn't bear the client's disappointment, and thought about what other values I could provide for the clients and the society."

According to Wang Desheng, people could no longer work alone in the new era, and he began to think about this when he first became a lawyer in 2003. "I'm not the only one thinking of this. I often discuss with my colleagues, and we agreed that future law firms will be of corporate system, in which there is clear division of areas, the lawyers have a sense of belonging and work as a team, the firm has unified marketing, publicity and management, and it provides care and training for both professional lawyers and apprentices."

In the second half of 2014, Beijing East Associates and Concord & Partners were preparing for their merger into a corporate firm, which conformed with Wang Desheng's idea perfectly. "Most importantly, the senior lawyers at Beijing East Associates and Concord & Partners are like gods in my heart. They are all highly reputed legendary figures in the industry. When I have lunch with them or chat with them, I can feel their unique charm. They are all very approachable and always stay in keeping with the times. Although they are mostly around 60 years old, their mind is even more active than young people's in some way." It was thanks to the appreciation of those luminaries that Wang Desheng joined this team and became a partner.

At East & Concord Partners, Wang Desheng's ideas and managerial capability were significantly improved, and he actively pushed the development of corporate law firms. Compared with traditional firms, corporate law firm had a relatively higher communication and management cost, but its productive force and work capacity were largely enhanced through the attraction and cultivation of talents. Wang Desheng believed in the following principle: "the closer people work together, the greater work capacity they obtain. Taking into account the cooperation cost and trust, work capacity isn't 'one plus one is two', but is much larger than two. The future legal service market will be dominated by corporate law firms."

At East & Concord Partners, Wang Desheng specialized in acquisition, merger, equity stock and fiscal and tax affairs. According to him, there will be huge market demand for fiscal and tax services in the future. Regarding the fact that the tax authority has too much power of discretion and leaves little room for lawyers, Wang said humorously, "tax lawyers will play a bigger role when one day enterprises dare to sue the tax administration."

Wang Desheng has had an eventful life full of twists and turns. In an interview, he said, "the process of growth is a journey of correcting mistakes for everyone. You have to experience it, do it and make a mistake to finally realize what's really suitable for you, what's right, and then choose the right path." A Chinese saying goes that "At 40, one begins to understand the world". The 40-year-old Wang Desheng still has many issues to face and deal with, but we have reasons to believe that he will continue to make new endeavors and dare to make mistakes, and will take his career to a new realm.

The original article was published in Accounting Messenger

644th issue, 2017