On this date in 2009, China executed a rogue securities trader for disappearing around $10 million.

The first person executed for securities corruption in China, Yang used his position as a trader for Galaxy Securities to embezzle some 65 million yuan for personal gain.

He never disclosed the money’s whereabouts, presumably taking the secret with him to the grave. (Or to the organ donor market.)

As gangster capitalists go, Yang could hardly be considered exemplary either by scale or by ruthlessness. His peculation undoubtedly harmed many people, but there’s no known whiff of violence about him; he was caught after attempting suicide.

But by the same token, the occasional sacrifice of such middling malefactors potentially helps discharge some of the tension generated by the structural inequality accompanying China’s new oligarchy. What to do in such a world?

“Preserve your moral integrity and don’t set too much store by business results,” Yang told a newspaper prior to his execution. You said it, brother.

On this day..

• 1452: Antonio Rizzo, cannonaded
• 1718: Avram Lopukhin, Peter the Great's brother-in-law
• 1905: Mary Rogers, chloroformer
• 1915: Cordella Stevenson lynched
• 1746: Charles Radclyffe, twice Jacobite rebel
• 1975: Isobel Lobato, wife of East Timor's Prime Minister
• 1934: John and Betty Stam, China missionaries
• 1922: Four anti-Treaty Irish Republicans
• Hand of Glory: 1,500 days and counting
• 1828: Joseph Hunton, forger
• Themed Set: Reputation
• 1982: Suriname's "December murders"
• 1793: Madame du Barry, who hated to go
• 1596: Francisca Nunez de Carvajal, her children, and four other crypto-Jews of her family