Front Burner - Inside China’s secretive Lop County Hair Product Industrial Park

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

The Chinese government says the Lop County Hair Product Industrial Park in the country's northwest is a place where people make wigs and other hair products that get shipped across the globe. Others say what’s happening at the park is forced labour, and that it’s just the latest in a pattern of grave human rights abuses committed in recent years against the country’s Uighur Muslim population — including the use of detention camps, mass surveillance and even forced sterilization. The Lop County Hair Product Industrial Park in Xinjiang province is an incredibly secretive, highly guarded place, yet Globe and Mail journalist Nathan VanderKlippe managed to travel there. Today on Front Burner, VanderKlippe discusses what he saw.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. The Chinese government says the 100-hectare Lop County Hair Product Industrial Park in western China is a place where people go to work, making wigs and other hair products that get shipped across the globe. Others, including the U.S. government, say what's happening at the park and parks like it is forced labor and that it's just the latest in a string of grave human rights abuses committed in recent years

against the country's Uyghur Muslim population, including the use of mass re-education camps, mass surveillance, and even forced sterilization. The Lopp County Hair Product Industrial Park is an incredibly secretive place, highly guarded, and Globe and Mail journalist Nathan Vanderklip, well, he managed to travel there. He's just returned, and today on FrontBurner, he'll tell us what he saw. what he saw. Hi, Nathan, thank you so much for making the time to be with us today. You're very welcome. So we're talking to you in Beijing right now, but how far away was this place that you went to? It's about 3,200 kilometers from Beijing. It's almost equidistant between Baghdad and Beijing. And I want to talk to you about something that happened to you once you land in Xinjiang

province before you even get to the industrial park. And I understand that despite your negative COVID test, you had to do a brief quarantine and another test. But once you got out of the hotel, you quarantined in. What happened? So the first thing I did was I headed for the Grand Bazaar, which is sort of in the midst of a neighborhood where there's a large Uyghur population. And I remember walking out of the hotel and it was quite cold. It was like minus 16 degrees. So you're just, you know, you're kind of bundled up. You're heading out. I was looking for a taxi, there's quite a lot of traffic out front.

And I remember just seeing sort of like a white boxy Volkswagen sedan sitting there with its nose pointed out and thinking that seemed a little odd. But then I just sort of walked on and ended up flagging a taxi. And as as I did I noticed a very similar looking car doing a u-turn into traffic just ahead of me I thought oh I think I know who these guys are sure enough they were following me and they followed me sort of on the road and on foot everywhere I went in Urumqi. I should point out, by the way, that none of what I'm saying is anything like a surprise to any journalist who's worked in China and has traveled to Xinjiang. This is entirely par for the course. I mean, this is not the most extraordinary story that's been told here,

but I think just the fact that it is so routine is probably somewhat extraordinary in and of itself. Right. I think this gets me to my next question, which is why did you want to go to the Lopp County Hair Product Industrial Park in the first place? Well, there's been quite a lot of research that's been done over the last year, year and a half, looking at the rise of forced labour in Xinjiang. And I started writing about the re-education facilities that had started to take shape in Xinjiang in 2017. And, of course, I think most of your listeners will have heard by now about a million or more Uyghurs that were placed in some of these re-education camps. Chinese government documents outline in meticulous detail the pursuit, incarceration and indoctrination.

Including a record of a seven-day sweep in June of 2017 in which more than 15,000 people were picked up off the streets. Gulbaha says the Chinese authorities never explained why they thought she was a terrorist. If you were caught speaking Uyghur, you were locked up in a dark room. We also had to write out lines of praise to the Chinese Communist Party. China said last year already that the trainees in those camps, the students in those camps had all graduated. But there is another chapter that is unfolding and has been unfolding first, I think, in parallel with the camps themselves, because there were a number of these camps, or as China would call them, vocational training skills centers. A number

of them were co-located with small factory operations. And we heard, I was in Kazakhstan and heard from people there who talked about being placed in a factory work sort of in parallel with some of the ideological training they were given. But what's happening now is different. And it involves sort of a fairly large scale industrialization of areas that had until now been fairly agricultural. been fairly agricultural. Is it fair for me to say that this is like the evolution of what has been happening with the Uyghurs? Yeah, that's sort of how I understand it. And from the perspective of what people in China, what officials in China will tell you, they will say that there were people who had extremist thoughts. Those thoughts had to be changed. They had to be given skills that they could use then to become productive members of

society. And this is all coincided with a really major national push to end extreme poverty by the end of 2020. This was a goal that the Communist Party had set. So a lot of these things are sort of a controlled environment. Two is it places people in wage-earning work in areas where officials are being evaluated on their ability to bring people out of poverty. And so having people in wage-earning work is helpful for that. President Xi Jinping says unprecedented achievements have been made in Xinjiang's economic and social development. She said the sense of happiness and security has increased among people of all ethnic groups. So you get to the park, finally, and tell me what happened.

What does it look like from the outside you know where where is it exactly yeah and that was that was a slightly complicated question because um when you just type it in to the local mapping services here there's a baidu maps and there's a gaoda maps um it doesn't really pop up and it's not exactly clear where it is. So we landed in Hotan, and I was traveling with another journalist from The Economist, who's also written about our trip as well. And we landed in Hotan. We had another COVID test. They've actually built a new structure outside of the airport in Hotan that you can't exit the airport without getting another COVID test. outside of the airport in Hotan that you can't exit the airport without getting another COVID test and hop into a taxi and basically went to the place that we had identified as the likely

site of this. But at that point in time, we just knew it as the likely site. We weren't even 100% sure that this is the right place. And the reason why we wanted to go here was because it seemed like one of these places that had really been a concentrated center, both first for re-education and now for the growth of this industrial sector. It's also attracted a fair amount of attention in the U.S. So any products that come out of this Lopp County Hair Product Industrial Park have faced sort of import restrictions and other sanctions in the U.S. So one of the other reasons for going was just to see if those other sanctions in the U.S. So one of the other reasons for going was just to see if those measures taken by the U.S. were having any obvious effect.

So we went to go see this place. We sort of drove out of town. It was about an hour drive. You exit sort of kind of an agricultural area, and you enter into what's really a desert landscape. And then suddenly there's this sort of large industrial development that sort of took shape sort of out of the desert effectively. And it's sort of long and narrow. It's something like five kilometers long. And it has a couple of roads that come into

us. We were coming along the highway. And so there are a couple of places where we can make left-hand turns to enter. But when we tried to do that, we were blocked. There were people on the road that sort of turned us away. It seemed like other cars could go in, but we weren't allowed to go in. Wow. So we were basically sitting in this taxi, just kind of driving along, not knowing what would happen. And I was just looking at the map and I noticed that there was one final road that sort of constituted the eastern boundary of this park. And I thought, well, let's give that a shot. So we drove a couple more kilometers and then we came upon this effectively this this desert construction

road it was just tracks tire tracks across the sand and so we thought well let's go for a walk and so we got out of the taxi and immediately where we got out of the taxi, there was a corner of some sort of facility that was, it was sort of a metal to steel fence and then topped with four lines of electric wire. And then right at the corner there, there's a large surveillance camera. And so I took a couple of pictures of that and then we kept walking. And then all of a sudden, two people came running up. And what did these people say to you? You know, did they tell you why they were trying to prevent you from coming into the park? No, no, they did not. They didn't tell us who they were. There was two people at this point in time. They seemed to be Uyghur men, one of whom spoke quite good English, actually. And they were adamant that we could not take pictures. And so I had taken pictures on an SLR. And, and I actually deleted a bunch of those.

because it felt like the real goal here was to see if we could progress farther into the park and see what we could see because at this point we were really on the most distant corner of the park and so we did that and then we just kept walking and there was every once in a while they would occasionally sort of decide that we could go no farther and they would stop they would literally step in front of us. There was occasional pushing and grabbing and, you know, they did not want us to go any farther. And somehow we just kind of kept going. And there was nobody official. You know, I presume these people worked for some sort of security service, but they never made that clear. They were, as best we could tell, just strangers trying to prevent us from going and

didn't give any grounds for doing so. I want to talk a little bit about some more of what you saw. I know you wrote that there were signs with lines like, listen to the party, be grateful to the party, follow the lead of the party. And like, what other phrases did you see? And what does all that language say to you? Right. And so there was a number of different buildings that we saw, and they had different bits of writing on them. And in China, it's very common for there to be sort of either company names that are placed in very large characters on the top of a building,

or sort of propaganda messages. And often, the exact nature of those propaganda messages give some sort of indication of what kind of place they are. And so in one of the buildings, there was a slogan that said, labor is glorious. And that is a slogan that is associated with what's known as sort of the rural surplus labor campaign, the idea that there is, according to officials anyways, there are underemployed people in rural areas and those

people need to be taken out of those rural areas and given better employment. And so labor is glorious is one of the slogans that's associated with that. And that was actually on the complex, which looked like a residential complex that was surrounded by that steel fence and the electric wire on top of it. And in fact, later on, we ended up seeing two groups of people arranged in lines outside on courtyards. No idea who they are, but it's possible that they were there for some sort of labor training. Listening to you talk about these slogans, I can't help but think of Auschwitz. The slogan, work will set you free, was famously on the outside of that camp. And of course, I've heard experts say here that what we're looking at in China is probably the largest internment of any religious minority since the Holocaust. I think there are a lot of elements of the things that China has done in Xinjiang that have drawn parallels for people with 1930s and 1940s Germany. I suppose I should point out that there's one enormous difference in that we have no evidence of anything that looks like extermination camps that have taken place in Xinjiang.

extermination camps that have taken place in Xinjiang. And it's grown common in the Uyghur community in particular to call these indoctrination and skills training camps to call them concentration camps. But I think in the understanding that most of us grow up with of what a concentration camp constitutes, you know, we think of that as meaning an extermination camp. We don't have any evidence of that. But what we do have evidence for are things like forced sterilizations and forcible labor and some of these other elements that are taking place. And I think that brings back a lot of memories for people

when they hear about this. Right. Right. And what do we know about the conditions that the people there live in, the people that live and work, you know, in this industrial park? Not a whole lot. Of course, I didn't get into any of the factories. Their objective was to get me out of there as opposed to letting me in. We have reports from state media

that have shown people in these factories and have conducted interviews with them and with bosses who have said there are labor contracts that are signed and people are well treated. I spoke with a person whose brother was in a factory work and his brother worked during the week and was allowed to come home on Saturdays and then was brought back to the factory on Sundays. And so that would suggest that it's sort of residential work during the week and with a brief ability to go back home on the weekends. But as far as the actual conditions, we don't know. We don't know.

There was Lopp County itself has at one point said that they'd offered free room and board to more than 8,000 workers in this industrial park. So that would be an indication that whoever's working there is residing in or near the factories rather than at home. But we don't know a whole lot. I mean, we do know other things. We know that in a number of these factories, people are paid by piecework. And so, of course, the stories that we read about in state media are people who have done well and are making decent money based on the production that they're able to achieve. But I've spoken with people in the past as well who have said that the piecework rate was so low that they were making very, very little at all. And so we have little bits and

pieces, but we don't have a complete picture. And in this particular park, they're making things like wigs, right? Am I right to say that? Yeah, wigs and other hair products, but wigs is a big one. That's right. And what have others said about the amount of agency that the people there have to do their work? Well, the idea is, it's difficult. These things are complicated. And the belief is that there is not a lot of agency. That the man that I spoke with whose brother had been placed in one of these factories effectively said that his brother had no choice but to do this. And as further evidence for that, his brother had a cousin who runs a supermarket and his cousin seemed to have been reasonably well connected. And so his cousin took some steps to get this brother out of the factory situation. But the

only way to do so was for his cousin to effectively act as a guarantor and say, I will employ him at my supermarket. And so all of these things suggest that people are being bound to work in ways that do not give them, as you said, the agency in order to sort of choose what they want to do and be where they want to be. Amy Lairs with the Center for International and Strategic Studies. There's an idea that you can reform people's minds and cut off their connection to their culture and religion by putting them to work in factory jobs. I actually interviewed a number of former detainees who were put to work. Their communications were monitored. They were paid in a year what they should have been paid in a month. The kind of treatment that these workers received when they are detained

continues when they're working. Episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and

podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cops. You mentioned before the U.S. targeting the area, that they're now blocking certain products from Xinjiang, like cotton, computer parts, apparel. And speaking about the Lobb County Park, American Customs officers seized tons of wigs and hair pieces in June and then banned all hair imports from the park. And what is the Canadian government doing about all this? Well, the Canadian government has joined with other countries, particularly at the United Nations, to condemn some of the things that are taking place in Xinjiang. We've had a parliamentary committee declare that what's happening in Xinjiang is genocide. But to this point, we have not seen any direct action from the Canadian government towards companies or types of imports or other things.

And one final question. I suppose I'm curious, too, why there isn't more international action on this. I feel like for several years now, we've been hearing this mounting body of evidence of what is happening. You know, for example, the ICIJ investigation last year that revealed all these secret documents that sort of very, very clearly revealed plans to detain, surveil, and indoctrinate Uyghur Muslims in the area. And, you know, as a reporter who has gone through so much to report on this important issue, you know, why do you think there hasn't been more global movement here? I mean, my sense is that there has just been a real struggle to figure out how to act toward China. is that there has just been a real struggle to figure out how to act toward China.

I remember at one point a diplomat in Beijing told me, we were talking about Russia and we were talking about China, and they said, you know, Russia's easy. Russia's a small economy. It's easy, effectively, just to say no when it comes to Russia. China's not that way. I mean, many countries around the world are heavily dependent on China, including for vital things. I mean, we've seen this with regard to the dependence on China for things like personal protective equipment in the current pandemic. And there are companies in Canada that

depend heavily on China. I mean, consumers in Canada depend heavily on China for not just the goods that they see on the shelves, but also the price of those goods. And so these are sort of complicated, interwoven questions. And I think that has made everything difficult. And of course, China has, the Chinese authorities have done what they could to argue that their policies in Xinjiang are right-headed and they've made arguments in terms of sort of management of extremism and of sort of combating poverty and that sort of thing. And so I do feel like anything, any question with regard to China often does not have a simple answer. Or if it does have a simple answer, the simple answer comes with a significant enough consequence that it feels like it's no longer a simple answer.

And so I think these are the sorts of things that you end up wrestling with on an individual level, on a corporate level, as well as on a national level. Right. Nathan Vieterclip, thank you so much for your reporting and also for coming on and having this conversation today. It was really fascinating and feels incredibly important. So thank you. You're very welcome. All right, so before we go today, beloved spy novelist John le Carre died over the weekend. He was 89 years old. The author of books like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Night Manager, and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold was both a critical darling and a bestseller, whose stories reached even wider audience through TV and film adaptations. Born David Cornwell in England, Le Carre was working in intelligence when he published his first thriller, Call for the Dead. He adopted the

pseudonym John Le Carre to get around a ban on British Foreign Office employees publishing books under their own names. That's all for today. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow.