chinese bankers get spanked for poor performance.

New video footage that appears to show eight employees of a rural bank in China being publicly spanked with a stick has inspired a wave of controversy, leading to the suspension of the bank's chairman and deputy governor. The spankings reportedly took place on Saturday in Changzhi during a training program for employees of the Changzhi Zhangze Rural Commercial Bank, according to NBC News.

The footage, which quickly went viral after first making its way across Chinese social media outlets, allegedly shows trainer Jiang Yang hitting four men and four women with some sort of a stick as some of them wince in pain. According to the Guardian, the trainer also shaved the male employees' heads and cut the hair of the women after they "performed poorly" during the company's training weekend. "Why were you ranked the lowest today?" the trainer is heard saying during the video, according to NBC News. Each employee then responds by saying the punishment is "because I have not exceeded myself."



Jiang, who later said that spanking was a training method he'd used "for many years," said the bank's leadership wasn't directly to blame for the incident. The bank had hired a training company based in Shanghai to run the course, which ended with Jiang brining the 8 employees with the lowest scores to the stage for the spanking.

The video, which first showed up via People's Daily on Facebook, has drawn widespread criticism for what many consider an extreme form of employee punishment. "Completely unacceptable!" one commenter wrote. "He is not a leader. He is a dictator and he should be in the military instead [of] with a bank." Another commenter called the footage "disgraceful," adding that its viral status was harming "China's global image."

Surprisingly, extreme employee training sessions are seemingly not entirely uncommon. A user on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, described a similar session at a separate company that involved planks, consuming raw eggs, and shaved heads. "I wasn't physically punished, but I feel fear and humiliation whenever I think of that session," the woman wrote, according to ABC 7. "The bosses would just justify it all in the name of performance boosting."

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