China Executed 14 Billionaires for Corruption
By wchung | 25 Apr, 2025

China executed 14 people with assets of at least a billion yuan ($155 million) during the past eight years in its aggressive campaign to root out corruption, according to Changchun-based New Culture News.

Just last Friday a China court handed down a death sentence for Zhang Chunjiang, former vice-chairman of China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile phone operator by subscribers, according to state-owned Xinhua News Agency.

One of the oddest, most sensational death sentences was carried out in 2008 against Wang Zhendong, chairman of the Yingkou Donghua Trading Group, for what amounted to a ponzi scheme to sucker investors into buying and breeding ants to be used as aphrodisiacs. Wang took in about $400 million between 2002 and 2005 by persuading over 10,000 investors to spend $1,300 for each ant-farm kit reportedly worth less than $30 in hopes of realizing 40 to 60 percent returns. Fifteen executives who participated in Wang’s scheme were sentenced to prison.

Another sensational case involved Yuan Baojing, a former stockbroker, who was executed by lethal injection in 2006 for the murder of a policeman who had tried to blackmail him. Yuan, 40, had become famous for his rise a poor farming family to the head of a multi-billion-dollar investment group. He was executed for hiring his brother and cousins to murder the policeman who had worked as a hitman, then sought to blackmail Yuan. One of Yuan’s brothers and one of his cousins were also executed for the murder. Yuan won a stay of execution in October of 2005 when his wife, Zhuo Ma, a famous Tibetan dancer and professor at Beijing’s Central University for Nationalities, transferred ownership of shares in an Indonesian oilfield, worth about $5 billion to the government the day before the scheduled execution. That won a 5-month stay of execution.

The New Culture News reviewed media reports over the past eight years to compile the data on executions.

China’s yuan billionaires currently number 1,900, twice as many as in 2009, according to the 2010 Hurun Wealth Report.