Two executives from a bank in northwestern China have been suspended from work after a video was circulated on the internet showing staff getting publicly spanked for performing poorly in a training class. 
 
 The video, apparently filmed on a mobile phone, showed eight employees in yellow uniforms standing on a platform when a man with microphone asked why they had ranked last in the day’s training. 
 
 The eight, including four women, listed reasons such as “failing to make a personal breakthrough” and “inadequate team cohesiveness”. 
 
 With a thick stick in his hand, the man said “get your butts ready” and began to spank each of the eight in turn in front of other trainees. 
 
 Outcry after film shows motorist in Beijing repeatedly slapping tricycle delivery man for scratching his car 
 
 After three rounds, a woman on the far right tried to cover her hip and the man berated her, saying, “take off your hand!” 
 
 The 75-second video emerged online on Monday and quickly triggered heated discussion online. 
 
 Many criticised the bank executives for the brutal punishment, which they said had violated the rights of employees. 
 
 Officials from Shanxi Rural Credit Cooperatives Union later confirmed to the news website Chinanews.com that the video was taken on Saturday when the Zhangze Rural Commercial Bank carried out performance training for its 216 staff. 
 
 An unnamed member of staff told the Beijing Times that the spanking was only a part of the training that day and as another punishment 16 employees were forced to have their heads shaved. 
 
 The newspaper quoted another unnamed female employee as saying that the spanking was a part of the training and the man with the stick was a trainer rather than a bank executive as some internet users claimed. 
 
 Jiang Yang, the trainer from the Shanghai Hongfeng Leadership Academy who was filmed in the video, later issued a public apology online for his behaviour. 
 
 He said physical spanking was “one of the most effective ways to raise consciousness”, although he admitted his training methods may not be acceptable to everybody. 
 
 Jiang later told the Beijing Times the aim of the training was to improve students’ way of thinking and to encourage them to be more competitive. 
 
 Pope says it’s OK to spank your children 
 
 Unnamed sources told the newspaper Jiang charges 100,000 yuan (HK$120,000) a day to carry out training classes. 
 
 The Shanxi Rural Credit Cooperatives Union, which oversees the rural commercial bank, said the two executives, including the president of the Zhangze bank, were suspended for failing to assess the training and a special task force had been set up to investigate, the newspaper said. 
 
 The bank would also help employees seek compensation from the trainer, it said. ||||| Video Of Chinese Bank Employees Being Spanked Prompts Suspensions 
 
 The president of a regional bank in China has been suspended after a video was circulated in which an official at a special training session went down a row of eight employees to deliver a hard spanking as punishment for poor performance. A second executive has also reportedly been suspended. 
 
 In theory, the incident might sound like a parody of a corporate motivational session. But as the video shows, the reality was severe: a man wielding a section of wood repeatedly went up and down a row of male and female bank employees, striking them across their backsides for "not exceeding themselves," as China's People's Daily wrote in its translation. 
 
 As the South China Morning Post reports, many people have "criticized the bank executives for the brutal punishment, which they said had violated the rights of employees." 
 
 The punishment was carried out on an auditorium stage Saturday, in full view of around 200 fellow employees of the Rural Commercial Bank in Shanxi province. A video that seems to have been recorded by an audience member soon went viral, depicting the trainer making at least four trips up and down the row of employees and drawing clearly pained reactions from the participants. 
 
 People's Daily provides these details about the bank's explanation: 
 
 "The announcement made by the Shanxi Rural Credit Cooperatives said that this was a 'Breakthrough in Performance' training session for their employees. The trainers were hired from 'Hongfeng Leadership Academy' in Shanghai. One of the trainers graded their performance on June 18, and punished those who ranked bottom by spanking and cutting hair. "The bank said it has stopped the training session, asked the Leadership Academy and its trainer to openly apologize, and suspended several managing personnels from the branch. Economic compensation is in discussion for the spanked employees, said the announcement." 
 
 According to the South China Morning Post, the man identified as the wood-wielding trainer has apologized for his actions. 
 
 Citing the Beijing Times, the Morning Post adds that the trainer, Jiang Yang, explained that he sees spanking as "one of the most effective ways to raise consciousness" — and that he acknowledges that not everyone would agree. ||||| Only three days after stories first began to surface about his alleged conduct four decades ago, the Anniston Star's former publisher and chairman of its parent company resigned today. 
 
 In a statement released to the Anniston Star, H. Brandt Ayers stepped down as chairman of Consolidated Publishing. This followed several days of reporting in multiple media outlets of allegations that Ayers spanked female reporters in the 1970s. 
 
 Ayers' statement reads: "It is of utmost importance to me that this newspaper continue to serve its role of reporting on matters of concern to the Anniston community and that nothing stand in the way of preserving the newspaper as an independently owned publication serving the community. I feel my resignation at this time is in the best interests of the paper and its mission." 
 
 The third generation of his family to own the paper, Ayers was publisher from the 1960s until 2016. Ayers no longer serves as director, chairman or employee of the company, effective immediately, the paper reported. 
 
 His wife, Josephine Ayers, will replace him as chairman. She had served as the board's vice chairman. As late as Tuesday, Ayers had said he had no intention of resigning. 
 
 "As a very young man with more authority than judgment, I did some things I regret," Ayers said in a statement earlier this week. "At my advanced age I wish I could relive those days again, knowing the seriousness of my position and with the accumulated judgment that goes with age." 
 
 Ayers, sometimes known as Brandy, occasionally wrote for the paper but, by some accounts, hasn't visited its newsroom in years and only maintained a connection with editors by e-mail. 
 
 'A fine place' 
 
 In the 1970s, the Star "was a fine place to begin a career," remembered Trish O'Connor, who maintains an advisory position at Coastal Carolina University. She covered City Hall and general assignments from 1972 through 1979. 
 
 Among Alabama's newspapers, the Anniston Star has long had the reputation as an incubator for young reporters looking to cut their teeth in community journalism. Independently owned and operated by the Ayers family, it also earned the ire of some for its unabashedly liberal stances on integration and progressive politics in the 1960s and 70s. The Star was the only Alabama paper to endorse George McGovern for president in 1972. 
 
 In those days, it had a stable of young reporters, perhaps a third of whom were female, learning the craft covering trials, small-town politics, crime and sports. 
 
 "It was a place where a lot of journalists have started out, learned to do quality journalism, and gone on to other things," O'Connor said. "Some people made lifelong careers, and others used those skills in other ways." 
 
 But there was a secret among some in the newsroom, some former reporters said - Brandy Ayers was known to spank female employees. 
 
 Tom Gordon, who later went on to work for the Birmingham News, was there from 1974 through 1981, eventually becoming a state editor. Though he said he never saw any incident involving Ayers, he heard about incidents and the concerns of his colleagues second-hand. 
 
 "It wasn't like when Brandy walked into the room, everybody cringed. You could talk with him," Gordon said. "You'd see him on a recurring basis- once a week, or more. He was not an ivory tower figure... It was just a closely held secret. It's just so weird, looking back on it. You wonder why you didn't do more." 
 
 Veronica Kennedy, then Veronica Pike, was the first woman to publicly say she was victimized by Ayers in an interview with former Anniston Star reporter Eddie Burkhalter and in subsequent published reports. 
 
 Kennedy told AL.com she was working at the time as a clerk on a Saturday shift making calls and taking obituaries while attending college. She said she had very little interaction with Ayers for the three-or-so years she had worked at the Star. She was just happy to be learning the craft of journalism. Saturdays usually saw very few reporters, and on this particular day, she said, there seemed to be no one else around. 
 
 Then Ayers came into the newsroom and asked her to read an editorial, what he called "some fine writing." After scanning the page, she jokingly asked him who wrote it. 
 
 According to her, he announced, "Oh, you're being a bad girl. I have to punish bad girls." Kennedy said she thought he was kidding, but as he approached her, she grabbed onto her chair. Ayers, she said, took a pica pole - a long, thin metallic ruler used in those days in newsrooms - wrestled her out of the chair, bent her over the desk and spanked her hard enough to leave marks. 
 
 He asked her how old she was, indicating he intended to strike her for each year. She said 18, hoping to get it over with faster. Kennedy was in her 20s, while Ayers was around 40. 
 
 Kennedy said she later learned she wasn't the first woman to experience this treatment. 
 
 "It took me a little while to process it," she said. "It hit me that this man only assaults young women who work at his newspaper. That's when I guess that I realized it was control, a sexual kind of control, as well as power over these women's future." 
 
 Kennedy said she was happy to learn Ayers had resigned, but called it "just a baby step" as the family is still in control of the company. 
 
 "I am not disappointed. I'm happy that at least there was some acknowledgement that these incidents occurred," she said. 
 
 Ayers seemed to confirm the incident with Kennedy in a statement he released to the Anniston Star this week, saying simply, "Let the accusation stand." 
 
 He released that statement while at the same time admitting that he spanked Wendy Sigal, a reporter from 1973 and 1974, in her own home. Ayers said he did so on the advice of a doctor. This story was confirmed by O'Connor, who heard the account from Sigal. According to O'Connor, Sigal, who was in her late 20s, said Ayers had "told her she had been a bad girl and she needed to be spanked -- and he spanked her." 
 
 Ayers claimed Sigal had been out of work because of a psychological ailment. Sigal apparently died in 2006. 
 
 Toward the end of an April 27, 2007 deposition in connection with an unrelated case, Ayers was asked under oath about Sigal, but not directly about any allegations regarding her. Instead, the questioning went to whether any employee had made a complaint that he had inappropriately touched them. 
 
 "Not formally, no," he said. 
 
 Informally? Came the next question. 
 
 "Possibly," Ayers responded. When asked when, Ayers replied, "Back in the dim ages. I've been there for forty years." He went on to say it was before the nineties, but no further questions were asked in relation. 
 
 'You misunderstood what happened yesterday' 
 
 Another former reporter, who asked not to be named due to the public nature of her current job, said she had just joined the Star staff after graduating from the University of Alabama in the fall of 1975. "The Star had a great reputation," she said. "It was just an honor to work there." 
 
 After about a month on the job, the woman said she missed covering a community improvement board meeting. Ayers called her to his office during the lunch hour the following day. 
 
 "You're going to have to be punished for that," she remembers him saying, in a forceful voice. 
 
 "He spanked me," she said. "I don't remember how many times, how long it lasted." She does not remember if it was with his bare hand. She described herself as crying, humiliated and upset. She says Ayers then told her to go into his private bathroom and clean herself up before she left - which she interpreted to mean to collect her emotions. 
 
 The former reporter said she told her boyfriend at the time, whom she later married, and another coworker. Word got back to a supervisor, and she was told a day later to go back to Ayers' office. He then told her, "You misunderstood what happened yesterday." There was no further explanation. 
 
 The woman said, at the time, she considered the incident to be assault, but not sexual. She mulled over going to the authorities but knew that Ayers was a prominent figure in the community. It was years before she told any family members, and only within the last months she told her children. 
 
 "I led a pretty sheltered childhood," she said. "I didn't know people got sexual gratification from things like that. It didn't cross my mind that it was a sexual thing, until other people started saying things." Later, when she received an unfavorable employee evaluation, she told her supervisors, "Considering what happened to me, I hope you'll take that into consideration." 
 
 "They knew what had happened," she said. Despite that, she felt the staff was "like a family" who were looking out for her. 
 
 One of them was Pat Guy, a reporter who worked at the Star from 1973 to 1977. She remembered hearing the woman's story and speaking with other female reporters at the time about it. To her, there was no doubt that Ayers' actions were sexual in nature. 
 
 "I didn't have any doubt about that," she said. "I definitely saw it as some kind of fetish. I didn't want to be alone with him." 
 
 However, it was infrequent, most agreed. Gordon remembered meetings with reporters in Ayers' office asking for accommodations on pay and overtime, but no mention was made of any grievances over his conduct in the newsroom. 
 
 O'Connor said some female reporters went to the paper's managing editor and executive editor for relief. "We had conversations with both of them," she said. "We said, 'This is a terrible situation. We need your help.'" But no action came as a result. 
 
 Instead, female reporters would informally tell new hires to watch out for the publisher. 
 
 "It was along the lines of 'be aware that this has happened in the past,'" O'Connor said. "If you're called to his office, take an editor along with you." 
 
 Gordon said word eventually made it to other newspapers, though not into the community. Two former Star employees said warnings were still being issued to female reporters in the late 1980s to remain seated at their desks if Ayers walked into the room. One media professional, Laura Axelrod, who relocated to Alabama in 2006, said she was warned several times not to seek a job at the Anniston Star "because of what happened to women." And O'Connor said Star alumni would stay in touch and occasionally relate that "it had happened again." 
 
 'The story is the story' 
 
 But since this story involves a newspaper, the story of how the story got initially told has become part of its telling. 
 
 Eddie Burkhalter, a 43-year-old with two stints of reporting at the Star totaling eight years, read a Thursday, Nov. 16, 2017 column in the Alabama Political Reporter written by Joey Kennedy. In it, Kennedy told how his wife Veronica said she was assaulted on her first job in journalism by the publisher at her Alabama newspaper, which was unnamed. The publisher "liked to spank his women employees," he wrote. 
 
 Burkhalter the following day told the Star's managing editor, Ben Cunningham, about the column and the fact that he had confirmed Kennedy was talking about the Star's former publisher. 
 
 Within a day, Burkhalter said, he was confident from talking to sources that "the allegations were most likely true." Before this, Burkhalter said he had never heard any stories involving Ayers or spankings. Talking to former newsroom employees, they were shocked to learn Burkhalter didn't know the stories. 
 
 He said Cunningham was initially receptive to pursuing the story. However, after a conversation with Star Publisher Bob Davis, Burkhalter said, Cunningham told him to gather names but not to contact them. Burkhalter said it was clear to him from the conversation that Davis "didn't want this story going anywhere." 
 
 "I've heard their explanations," Burkhalter said. "They're all bunk. I never believed them. I knew the truth when I saw Ben's face. He hung his head down. Do I understand it? Yes. It could have cost them their jobs." 
 
 Cunningham, in a pair of columns and an interview with AL.com, said Kennedy's piece was the first time he had heard any allegations regarding Ayers' conduct toward women in the workplace. Cunningham began working at the Star as an intern in 2002 and full-time in 2003. Star Publisher Bob Davis stated in his own column he had never heard any allegations in 14 years with Consolidated Publishing. 
 
 "The first thing I want to say is that it hurts to know that someone so closely identified with the institution I've spent my entire career with hurt people in the way (Ayers) did. I hurt for those people," Cunningham said. 
 
 Burkhalter said he told Cunningham and Davis that he would write the story and publish it elsewhere if he had to. According to Cunningham, Burkhalter violated an agreement the two had by continuing to talk to potential sources over the weekend before they'd had a chance to discuss how to proceed with the story. 
 
 Since Jan. 1, Cunningham published a column recounting the events of Burkhalter's resignation. Burkhalter, in a series of tweets Tuesday night, recounted his side, and Cunningham said the tweets accurately recounted their sometimes-heated conversations. Cunningham said he and Davis had considered reprimanding Burkhalter because he had continued to talk to sources before they'd had a chance to discuss the story. Instead, Burkhalter resigned. 
 
 Burkhalter, who typically covered the City of Anniston for the Star before he left, says he would have been happy not writing the story as long as it was covered. "We needed to be an example of great journalism, and this is how you do it," he said. "It wasn't about me being the one to do the story." 
 
 In a Jan. 2 column, Davis explained, "We hadn't yet had a chance to review how we would go about treating sources who wished to remain anonymous and inquiring into events alleged to have happened more than 40 years ago." The Anniston Star typically does not name people accused of sex crimes unless they are convicted in court. 
 
 However, Burkhalter said that explanation ignores the fact that the Star has named public figures who were accused of sex crimes. In September 2017, for example, the Star identified an Anniston High School teacher arrested for second degree sexual abuse. 
 
 Cunningham says the Star would have proceeded with reporting the story, regardless of how the editors' meeting with Burkhalter had gone. 
 
 "We were never not reporting the story," he said. "All I ever did was work to get this story in our paper. I was not able to do that at the speed that Eddie might have liked. But that's what I was trying to do." 
 
 The paper continued to gather information and published its story after Burkhalter's work appeared in the Alabama Political Reporter on Jan. 1. The Montgomery Advertiser also published a story reporting the allegations. The next day, Burkhalter went to work for a plumbing supply company in Anniston. 
 
 He said he has had offers to continue in journalism, but they would involve uprooting his family. He regrets that the way the story has come out has, in some ways, overshadowed the victim's stories. He also grows emotional when talking about his former colleagues and how it has affected their livelihoods. 
 
 Cunningham says it hurts to have "needlessly" lost Burkhalter from the Star staff, someone he considered a friend and "someone whose work I was proud to have been involved with editing." 
 
 The Star has announced it is instituting a new policy regarding workplace harassment. And Cunningham said the Star is continuing to report the story. 
 
 "The story is the story and we'll go where it takes us," he said. "That's not to say we don't get emotional about the things we've uncovered. This is what you do as a professional. You treat your own institution as you do the institutions you cover on a regular basis." 
 
 Sandy Davidson, a professor of media law at the University of Missouri, said the phenomenon of a media outlet, in this case a newspaper, reporting on itself is unfortunately becoming more common. The rise of the #MeToo phenomenon, focusing attention on sexual harassment and sexual assault claims and their victims, has affected many high-profile media figures in recent months. 
 
 "How hard has it been for Fox News, for NBC News, to report it," she said. "You can't really ignore the story. If you're going to be covering this story, you have to do it as straightforwardly as you can, given the circumstances. I think we're getting more and more models out there of how to do it. 
 
 "There's a grieving process, she said. "But still there's an obligation to covering it. You can't force a newspaper to publish what it doesn't want to publish. But you're talking more about public perception. It's difficult." 
 
 This story was edited to include material from an interview with a source on Jan. 5 at 1:25 p.m.
– A disturbing video getting attention on social media shows a row of eight Chinese bank employees on a stage being told to "get their butts ready" then spanked—hard—in front of their colleagues for "not exceeding themselves." The employees had been in a "Breakthrough in Performance" training class, and a man with a microphone asked them each to explain why they ranked lowest in the class, the South China Morning Post reports. After they all gave reasons like "failing to make a personal breakthrough," he whacked each of them on the behind with a thick stick four times. (After the third time, when one woman tried to cover herself with her hands, he yelled, "Take off your hand!") After the 75-second video, taken by someone in the audience, appeared online Monday and went viral, the president and another executive from the bank were suspended. Shanxi Rural Credit Cooperatives Union confirmed the video was taken during Zhangze Rural Commercial Bank's training on Saturday. NPR, citing People's Daily, says at least 200 people were in the audience. An anonymous staff member says that another punishment involved 16 employees whose heads were forcibly shaved. The man doing the spanking was a trainer, not a bank executive, and reportedly charges more than $15,000 per day for his classes. He has publicly apologized, though he insists spanking is "one of the most effective ways to raise consciousness."