Sun, Aug 17, 2014 page14

• Chinese county’s bald ambition: to rule hair market

  • By Tom Hancock / AFP, TAIHE, China
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  Sacks bulging with long, black — and lucrative — human hair spill onto the streets of a rural Chinese county whose farmers have helped make the country the world’s biggest exporter of products made from the material.

  As dawn broke over the morning market in Taihe County, vendors bringing hairy wares from across the country haggled with dozens of buyers as tempers frayed.

  “We have to bargain for hair,” said buyer Liu Yanwen, 35, who sported a buzzcut and arrived at the market at 5:30am in search of deals.

  

  Women thread together hair extensions destined for export at a factory in Taihe County in China’s eastern Anhui Province on July 28.

  Photo: AFP

  “We have a factory where we’ll turn it into products for export overseas,” he added, clutching a head’s worth of straight, thick black locks.

  Gao Pu, a vendor whose head was also shaved, tipped a knapsack containing dozens of bunches of hair onto the ground and said: “It comes from the heads of ordinary Chinese folks.”

  Prices can go as high as 5,400 yuan (US$880) per kilogram for cuts of 50.8cm.

  Taihe, in eastern Anhui Province, is home to more than 400 companies processing human hair into an array of curly extensions, wigs and other products which end up on heads in the US, Europe and Africa.

  Fu Quanguo, 64, pioneered the trade in the 1970s and said that initially, “we used to collect the human hair locally, but now it comes from all kinds of countries, Myanmar, Vietnam, countries like that.”

  “In the past, making hair products was tough and we did it all by hand... Now we’ve gone from small to big and are selling internationally,” said Fu, who now sports a crop of white hair.

  China exported nearly 75 percent of the world’s “bird skin, feathers, artificial flowers, human hair” products in 2012, according to the WTO’s International Trade Centre.

  The humble hair markets, ramshackle workshops and factories dotting the cornfields of Taihe generated US$88 million of exports in 2012, nearly half the county’s total, the Taihe County Government said.

  It is one of many “industrial clusters” — areas specializing in a single kind of product — that have sprung up in recent decades as China’s export economy boomed.

  They are especially common in the country’s east, where poverty-stricken farmers have pioneered small businesses since the 1980s, and now entire areas are dedicated to creating items such as lightbulbs, socks, cigarette lighters or bra hooks.

  Fu’s heir, 36-year-old son Fu Qianwei, has a company called Anna in English that exports US$8 million of hair a year, mostly to the US.

  “Each country has different demands on length, thickness and quality,” he said as workers sewed and curled clumps of hair destined for Africa — often seen as primarily a source of raw materials for China, but which also buys its finished goods.

  “As Africa’s economy grows, the market is growing and moving towards higher quality,” he said, standing beside boxes filled with “Afro Curly” extensions featuring illustrations of smiling black female models.

  In the factory, the hair is first disinfected in two huge barrels, before workers use paddles to stir clumps of strands in vats of steaming water.

  It is dyed in colors from blonde to black — via red and purple — before being dried in ovens, brushed and sewn into hair extensions by the plant’s mostly female staff.

  “I thread parts together; in a day I can do 1,500,” worker Zhang Qing, 23, said as she fed bunches of hair into a clattering sewing machine.

  Colleague Zhang Hongmei’s low stool was surrounded by piles of dyed red hair which she straightened with a large brush.

  Like most of the employees at the factory, she used to be a laborer in the fields.

  “If I wasn’t here I’d be working on the farm, but this work is less tiring and earns more money,” she said.

  Fu Qianwei said that hair product manufacturing is “by far the biggest industry” in Taihe and local authorities plan to create a huge industrial park devoted entirely to the sector.

  He recalled growing up in the 1980s, “when we would be happy if we had rice rather than corn.”

  Now he employs more than 200 full-time staff and escorts foreign clients to dinners at pricey restaurants in an imported car.

  “I owe my income to the hair industry,” he said. “Because the value of hair is so high, people call it black gold.”
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