They found the body hanging on the third floor of the Lee Der toy factory. Zhang Shuhong, a 52-year-old businessman, had apparently committed suicide, just days after US toy company Mattel blamed his company, Lee Der Industrial, in Foshan, in southern China, for the recall of one million toys coated in toxic lead paint.

In a summer of high-profile recalls of Chinese exports — pet food, shellfish, tires — Zhang’s suicide read like the latest twist in a morality play. Each week, it seemed, brought news of another faulty Chinese product; and with it, growing concerns about unscrupulous Chinese businessmen: cutting corners; pouring cheap, sometimes lethal, ingredients into their products; endangering consumers around the world, even children, to make a bigger profit.

But at the Lee Der factory in Foshan, an industrial city 225 km northwest of Hong Kong, Zhang’s colleagues and workers tell a less familiar narrative. They say that Zhang was a victim, too — of his own duplicitous suppliers, of China’s faulty supply chains, and of the pressures of its loosely regulated brand of capitalism, where Chinese entrepreneurs feel squeezed between Western companies’ appetite for cheap goods and the fierce local competition to satisfy it.

Unmarried and reportedly devoted to his company, Mr. Zhang was one of the hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs who had helped make China into the world’s factory floor, providing the inexpensive goods that fill the shelves of Wal-Mart and Target. According to those who knew him, he was anything but greedy. In fact, in an industry with a reputation for mistreating its workers, he paid his employees on time and did not make them perform mandatory overtime.

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