Ironically in China they often hang or shoot company directors..........Leman Brothers? RBS? You can only wish cant you
They shoot them, using a technique to end life as quickly as possible whilst causing minimum damage to the body - human bodies contain a variety of useful spare parts which can be (and are) harvested.
Everything is recycled in China
Hanging is more commonly used as a penalty in Oriental countries once part of the British Empire such as Malaysia and Singapore - a technique inherited from Blighty (they still use the 1950s HMP operational manuals to work out the rope length!)
Even there company directors usually just get sent to prison if they are caught making or selling poor quality products (however a Malaya prison is not exactly "Holiday Bay!") Hanging was most commonly used against drug users and dealers - but less so now as a combination of the British rave scene being exported there and Indian gangs flooding Malaysia with ketamine as a reprisal for getting tough on illegal immigration means loads of Malaysian youths are getting high.. now its a few whacks with the rotan (cane) and compulsory rehab - if the authorities hanged them all there'd be no youths left to eventually build the worlds' hard drives and MP3 players and routers!
China is however comparatively lenient on "party" drugs for an Asian nation and Shanghai has the reputation of being "the Amsterdam of Asia" - (I've been told its a good place to go clubbing!) I suspect this is a "Bread and circuses" tactic to stop youths complaining so much about long work hours and/or wider political issues like Tibet - but of course if they get
too mashed at weekends and are tired/sketchy on mondays it will also impact the quality of the factory output, just as British businesses were affected by young staff slacking off in the 1990s rave days)
What may have confused eddieo is that a couple of years ago there was a spate of China-made toys in the US being found to have toxic lead paint and other safety issues - when this came to a head the workers in China went into work one day to find the boss hanging from a beam right in the middle of the factory!
it wasnt the cops or a lynch mob, he had methodically arranged for the factory to be closed down, all the back wages to be paid and then took his own life.
All the workers lined the streets for his funeral and he was treated more like a hero/martyr (given a parade similar to our troops killed in the middle east) than a villain - the "bad guys" to them were the Americans for forcing down the budgets and thus the product quality and making corner cutting necessary.
something to think about when you are trying to drive the most ruthless bargain for your new gadgets