Untangling the North Korean Wig Manufacturing Industry
Listening to the stories of North Korean wig makers in their homes, factories, and in secret overseas, their voices echo the tales of their South Korean counterparts 60 years ago
By Rose Adams
- 2023.11.28
Workers at a textile factory in Pyongyang making face masks.
Listening to the stories of North Korean wig makers in their homes, factories, and in secret overseas, their voices echo the tales of their South Korean counterparts 60 years ago
By Rose Adams
- 2023.11.28
Workers at a textile factory in Pyongyang making face masks.
(Rodong Sinmun - News1)
While much of the current discussion of North Korea’s trade has revolved around its arms sales, a new trend has been quietly emerging. Arms sales to Russia may be profitable at the moment considering their big ticket nature, but North Korean trade has long been dominated by the Chinese market, which makes up approximately 70% of North Korea’s exports and over 90% of its total trade. While arms sales are dependent on wars beyond North Korea’s borders, trade with China provides a stable foundation for the newly-recovering North Korean economy. At the heart of this recovery and number one on North Korea’s export list for the last eight months? Hair products.
Hair products – wigs, fake facial hair, and false eyelashes – constituted as much as 65% of North Korea’s exports to China this September, according to Chinese customs data. In the month of September alone, North Korea exported 182 tons of hair products, worth a total of USD 17.96 million. In the first seven months of 2023, North Korean exports of wigs and fake lashes totaled USD 90 million, three times the country’s exports of hair products for the same period in 2019 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In addition to ballooning export figures, signs from inside the country also seem to suggest that the industry will continue to expand, both as a labor-intensive task for political prisoners and as a high-earning lifeline for urban entrepreneurs. Considering the growing role of the industry and its potential to be a major economic driver, let’s take a moment to “untangle” the complex supply and manufacturing chain behind North Korea’s wig business.
North Korea’s “Contract Manufacturing” (임가공 업체) System
One of North Korea’s most valuable economic assets is its labor force. Since the state decides where people work and pays a paltry salary, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) can cheaply produce labor-intensive products like knit goods, shoes, beadwork, watch components, and wigs. Trade officials at state enterprises search out Chinese businesses and offer these goods at a fraction of what it would cost to produce with Chinese workers. Textiles have long been a fixture of North Korea’s contract manufacturing system, also often referred to as “toll processing” or “OEM” production, but the role of wig manufacturing has been gradually expanding since trade enterprises reportedly entered the wig and eyelash manufacturing market in 2010.
In the case of wig-making, for example, when a North Korean company might receive an order from a Chinese company, the company will import raw materials from China, which workers then weave into wigs. Trade officials then collect and inspect the wigs before sending the finished products to Chinese companies for further processing or distribution. A basic wig at this stage of production is generally valued around RMB 25-50 (USD 3.5 – 5).
The workers at North Korea’s wig and eyelash factories are overwhelmingly young and female. Many workers are assigned to factories without much choice, but others join the factories due to their relative profitability. The work itself requires a high attention to detail, extreme dexterity, and sharp eyesight. As such, many students, including those as young as nine, work in the factories to help supplement their family’s income.
Prior to the pandemic, in 2018, hair exports rose 121% over the previous year and were projected to have grown a similar amount in 2019 prior to the pandemic. Contract manufacturing for all goods took a massive hit when North Korea completely shut its borders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hair product exports in 2019 had been valued at USD 31 million but fell to USD 375,000 for the whole of 2020. Unable to import necessary raw materials and with finished goods being held up indefinitely at customs, many trade companies went bankrupt during the pandemic.
Prison Labor
Yet, even as official China-DPRK trade dipped an additional 41% in 2021, the state still managed to produce some goods. The state-affiliated wig and eyelash factories remained closed, but in 2021 the authorities began allowing imports of raw materials for wig-making for a specific group: labor camps.
An estimated 20 – 30% of contract manufacturing products are made by political prisoners inside the country’s labor camps. While workers at state enterprises might receive paltry wages (such five cents per set of false lashes), prisoners don’t need to be paid at all. The Ministry of Social Security (and to a lesser extent, the Ministry of State Security) use prison labor to produce export goods at next to no cost for labor. Labor is divided within the camps according to age, gender, and sentence, and wig-making and eye-lash making appears to be designated as exclusively female labor, generally for women in their 20s and 30s. According to a 2015 HRNK report, women in the wig units did not work on a fixed schedule like other work units, rather but in direct response to the influx of orders from outside the camps.
Using prison labor to fill orders from Chinese companies is particularly profitable for the state, since profits on prison-made exports are split 70-30 between the state and the relevant ministry, but this split can reportedly be as extreme as 85-15 (as was the case in December 2022 when contract manufacturing began to resume post-pandemic).
Considering the official PRC-DPRK trade figures for September and assuming a conservative 20% was manufactured in re-education camps, prison labor netted USD 3.6 million for the North Korean authorities. Of this revenue, roughly USD 2.5 – 3 million went directly to state coffers.
This number will likely only get higher in the coming months. North Korean companies generally receive more contract manufacturing orders in winter than in summer, and the end of the fall harvest season means that labor camps can mobilize a greater percentage of the incarcerated population for manufacturing. Reports from inside a re-education camp in Hamhung this November, for example, corroborate this trend with reports that the Ministry of Social Security is pushing prison workers to further increase production before the end of the year.
The Cottage Industry
While a large portion of North Korea’s wigs are produced by forced labor in prison camps and the more ambiguously voluntary labor of ordinary workers at factories, the sheer demand for wigs and their profitability has led the industry to spill over into North Korea’s private sector. Recent reporting from Daily NK paints a picture of individuals from a variety of backgrounds, still primarily women, becoming involved in the hair industry.
With demand for wigs going up, the demand for hair with which to make wigs has also risen. In the month of September, North Korea’s number one import from China was hair for use in wig manufacturing. State enterprises are also buying up domestic hair, offering corn in exchange for bundles of hair. According to one report, a relatively long 25 centimeters (9.8 inches) bundle can fetch 20 to 25 kilograms of corn. As a result, many women are growing out their hair to sell off, even going so far as to avoid “fashion police” street task forces that might crack down on their non-regulation hair length.
Selling hair, while not a sustainable means of income, is a relatively accessible way for women to put a little food on the table. Wig-making, by contrast, requires a higher level of skill. Reports from border region cities Hyesan and Sinuiju suggest that women looking to learn wig-making can undergo two-week long apprenticeships from officers at the provincial trade office and, if they pass their final skills test, begin to fill orders for trade enterprises by working at home.
With pandemic economic difficulties persisting due to the state’s continued limitations on private trade, free-lancing for state enterprises offers an appealing alternative to spending the day hawking wares at the market. A Daily NK source in Hyesan estimated that a typical person might earn KPW 20,000 a week selling at the market, equivalent to about four kilograms of rice. By contrast, a single hairpiece can fetch anywhere between 5-12 kilograms of rice, depending on size and quality. A Nikkei Asia column reported that these first-stage wigs take approximately four to five hours to manufacture, while the Daily NK piece suggests that workers may make two hairpieces a week working during the night. Profits likely vary significantly depending on an individual’s work speed and the amount of time in the week they can dedicate to the craft, but even two pieces a week could earn a family 10 kilograms of rice. This represents a significant boost in the standard of living for households eating only two meals a day and relying on cheaper alternatives like corn.
There has even been a report that North Korean laborers overseas have entered the hair product industry to supplement their meager incomes. One Daily NK report found that workers deployed to textile factories in Liaoning, China, were spending three hours a day after work manufacturing false lashes. Unlike income at their official jobs where state officials take 2/3rds of their wages, workers can secretly keep profits from their “side gig.” Workers can make 20 jiao per set of lashes, which can add up to about RMB 35 (USD 4.80) for three hours of work. This low piecemeal rate has led workers to cut costs wherever possible, including using a cheaper glue that releases toxic fumes. Moreover, these three hours of meticulous and often nauseating or downright painful work come after the women have already spent their day working in the clothing factory from eight in the morning until seven at night.
Conclusion
Listening to the stories of North Korean wig makers in their homes, factories, and in secret overseas, their voices echo the tales of their South Korean counterparts 60 years ago. South Korea, like North Korea, relied on a cheap and skilled labor force and an export-driven economy to recover from the devastation of the Korean War. South Korean women and girls, many teenagers or younger, also flocked to textile factories for work. These women were simultaneously empowered to independently earn money while simultaneously being exploited in deplorable working conditions that often shortened their lives. As the wig-making industry grew, South Korean women, just like North Korean women now, cut and sold their hair (or had it cut by family members) to buy food and clothing. By 1970, wigs alone represented 12% of South Korea’s exports, third only after textiles and plywood.
By contrast, the precedent for the use of prison labor to make wigs is dim. China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has come under suspicion of using prison labor to make hair products for China’s booming hair export industry. Multiple Uighur women have also reported having their heads shaved upon entrance to the camps, sparking concerns that the hair in wigs and other products produced in the XUAR are made with hair taken from incarcerated women. Considering the dehumanizing treatment of prisoners inside North Korea, it is not hard to imagine a similar exploitation of female prisoners’ hair, as well as their labor, for the wig manufacturing industry.
The story of North Korean wig-making is a tangled one. Will wig-making be the salvation of North Korea’s foundering economy during a time when pandemic restrictions have threatened to plunge the country into a “second Arduous March?” Or does the widespread use of child and prison labor give us a moral imperative to crack down on North Korean hair products altogether, such as including hair products under UN sanctions? To what degree can we tolerate the exploitation of a vulnerable class inside North Korea so that another class of North Koreans can seize a new economic lifeline? These are the kinds of questions that can leave anyone tearing their hair out in frustration, but they deserve to be considered all the same.
North Korea’s wig industry will almost certainly continue to grow over the next few years. The majority of these wigs will pass through Chinese companies and are sold onwards to the rest of the world. At the same time, the United States is the single largest importer of hair products in the world. As the main drivers of demand, we are obligated to think more critically about where these hair products come from and whether they do suppliers more harm than good.
Views expressed in this guest column do not necessarily reflect those of Daily NK.
Rose Adams
Rose Adams is an aspiring North Korean scholar specializing in media, marketization, and women's rights in North Korea. She holds a master's degree in East Asian Studies from Stanford University.
While much of the current discussion of North Korea’s trade has revolved around its arms sales, a new trend has been quietly emerging. Arms sales to Russia may be profitable at the moment considering their big ticket nature, but North Korean trade has long been dominated by the Chinese market, which makes up approximately 70% of North Korea’s exports and over 90% of its total trade. While arms sales are dependent on wars beyond North Korea’s borders, trade with China provides a stable foundation for the newly-recovering North Korean economy. At the heart of this recovery and number one on North Korea’s export list for the last eight months? Hair products.
Hair products – wigs, fake facial hair, and false eyelashes – constituted as much as 65% of North Korea’s exports to China this September, according to Chinese customs data. In the month of September alone, North Korea exported 182 tons of hair products, worth a total of USD 17.96 million. In the first seven months of 2023, North Korean exports of wigs and fake lashes totaled USD 90 million, three times the country’s exports of hair products for the same period in 2019 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In addition to ballooning export figures, signs from inside the country also seem to suggest that the industry will continue to expand, both as a labor-intensive task for political prisoners and as a high-earning lifeline for urban entrepreneurs. Considering the growing role of the industry and its potential to be a major economic driver, let’s take a moment to “untangle” the complex supply and manufacturing chain behind North Korea’s wig business.
North Korea’s “Contract Manufacturing” (임가공 업체) System
One of North Korea’s most valuable economic assets is its labor force. Since the state decides where people work and pays a paltry salary, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) can cheaply produce labor-intensive products like knit goods, shoes, beadwork, watch components, and wigs. Trade officials at state enterprises search out Chinese businesses and offer these goods at a fraction of what it would cost to produce with Chinese workers. Textiles have long been a fixture of North Korea’s contract manufacturing system, also often referred to as “toll processing” or “OEM” production, but the role of wig manufacturing has been gradually expanding since trade enterprises reportedly entered the wig and eyelash manufacturing market in 2010.
In the case of wig-making, for example, when a North Korean company might receive an order from a Chinese company, the company will import raw materials from China, which workers then weave into wigs. Trade officials then collect and inspect the wigs before sending the finished products to Chinese companies for further processing or distribution. A basic wig at this stage of production is generally valued around RMB 25-50 (USD 3.5 – 5).
The workers at North Korea’s wig and eyelash factories are overwhelmingly young and female. Many workers are assigned to factories without much choice, but others join the factories due to their relative profitability. The work itself requires a high attention to detail, extreme dexterity, and sharp eyesight. As such, many students, including those as young as nine, work in the factories to help supplement their family’s income.
Prior to the pandemic, in 2018, hair exports rose 121% over the previous year and were projected to have grown a similar amount in 2019 prior to the pandemic. Contract manufacturing for all goods took a massive hit when North Korea completely shut its borders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hair product exports in 2019 had been valued at USD 31 million but fell to USD 375,000 for the whole of 2020. Unable to import necessary raw materials and with finished goods being held up indefinitely at customs, many trade companies went bankrupt during the pandemic.
Prison Labor
Yet, even as official China-DPRK trade dipped an additional 41% in 2021, the state still managed to produce some goods. The state-affiliated wig and eyelash factories remained closed, but in 2021 the authorities began allowing imports of raw materials for wig-making for a specific group: labor camps.
An estimated 20 – 30% of contract manufacturing products are made by political prisoners inside the country’s labor camps. While workers at state enterprises might receive paltry wages (such five cents per set of false lashes), prisoners don’t need to be paid at all. The Ministry of Social Security (and to a lesser extent, the Ministry of State Security) use prison labor to produce export goods at next to no cost for labor. Labor is divided within the camps according to age, gender, and sentence, and wig-making and eye-lash making appears to be designated as exclusively female labor, generally for women in their 20s and 30s. According to a 2015 HRNK report, women in the wig units did not work on a fixed schedule like other work units, rather but in direct response to the influx of orders from outside the camps.
Using prison labor to fill orders from Chinese companies is particularly profitable for the state, since profits on prison-made exports are split 70-30 between the state and the relevant ministry, but this split can reportedly be as extreme as 85-15 (as was the case in December 2022 when contract manufacturing began to resume post-pandemic).
Considering the official PRC-DPRK trade figures for September and assuming a conservative 20% was manufactured in re-education camps, prison labor netted USD 3.6 million for the North Korean authorities. Of this revenue, roughly USD 2.5 – 3 million went directly to state coffers.
This number will likely only get higher in the coming months. North Korean companies generally receive more contract manufacturing orders in winter than in summer, and the end of the fall harvest season means that labor camps can mobilize a greater percentage of the incarcerated population for manufacturing. Reports from inside a re-education camp in Hamhung this November, for example, corroborate this trend with reports that the Ministry of Social Security is pushing prison workers to further increase production before the end of the year.
The Cottage Industry
While a large portion of North Korea’s wigs are produced by forced labor in prison camps and the more ambiguously voluntary labor of ordinary workers at factories, the sheer demand for wigs and their profitability has led the industry to spill over into North Korea’s private sector. Recent reporting from Daily NK paints a picture of individuals from a variety of backgrounds, still primarily women, becoming involved in the hair industry.
With demand for wigs going up, the demand for hair with which to make wigs has also risen. In the month of September, North Korea’s number one import from China was hair for use in wig manufacturing. State enterprises are also buying up domestic hair, offering corn in exchange for bundles of hair. According to one report, a relatively long 25 centimeters (9.8 inches) bundle can fetch 20 to 25 kilograms of corn. As a result, many women are growing out their hair to sell off, even going so far as to avoid “fashion police” street task forces that might crack down on their non-regulation hair length.
Selling hair, while not a sustainable means of income, is a relatively accessible way for women to put a little food on the table. Wig-making, by contrast, requires a higher level of skill. Reports from border region cities Hyesan and Sinuiju suggest that women looking to learn wig-making can undergo two-week long apprenticeships from officers at the provincial trade office and, if they pass their final skills test, begin to fill orders for trade enterprises by working at home.
With pandemic economic difficulties persisting due to the state’s continued limitations on private trade, free-lancing for state enterprises offers an appealing alternative to spending the day hawking wares at the market. A Daily NK source in Hyesan estimated that a typical person might earn KPW 20,000 a week selling at the market, equivalent to about four kilograms of rice. By contrast, a single hairpiece can fetch anywhere between 5-12 kilograms of rice, depending on size and quality. A Nikkei Asia column reported that these first-stage wigs take approximately four to five hours to manufacture, while the Daily NK piece suggests that workers may make two hairpieces a week working during the night. Profits likely vary significantly depending on an individual’s work speed and the amount of time in the week they can dedicate to the craft, but even two pieces a week could earn a family 10 kilograms of rice. This represents a significant boost in the standard of living for households eating only two meals a day and relying on cheaper alternatives like corn.
There has even been a report that North Korean laborers overseas have entered the hair product industry to supplement their meager incomes. One Daily NK report found that workers deployed to textile factories in Liaoning, China, were spending three hours a day after work manufacturing false lashes. Unlike income at their official jobs where state officials take 2/3rds of their wages, workers can secretly keep profits from their “side gig.” Workers can make 20 jiao per set of lashes, which can add up to about RMB 35 (USD 4.80) for three hours of work. This low piecemeal rate has led workers to cut costs wherever possible, including using a cheaper glue that releases toxic fumes. Moreover, these three hours of meticulous and often nauseating or downright painful work come after the women have already spent their day working in the clothing factory from eight in the morning until seven at night.
Conclusion
Listening to the stories of North Korean wig makers in their homes, factories, and in secret overseas, their voices echo the tales of their South Korean counterparts 60 years ago. South Korea, like North Korea, relied on a cheap and skilled labor force and an export-driven economy to recover from the devastation of the Korean War. South Korean women and girls, many teenagers or younger, also flocked to textile factories for work. These women were simultaneously empowered to independently earn money while simultaneously being exploited in deplorable working conditions that often shortened their lives. As the wig-making industry grew, South Korean women, just like North Korean women now, cut and sold their hair (or had it cut by family members) to buy food and clothing. By 1970, wigs alone represented 12% of South Korea’s exports, third only after textiles and plywood.
By contrast, the precedent for the use of prison labor to make wigs is dim. China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has come under suspicion of using prison labor to make hair products for China’s booming hair export industry. Multiple Uighur women have also reported having their heads shaved upon entrance to the camps, sparking concerns that the hair in wigs and other products produced in the XUAR are made with hair taken from incarcerated women. Considering the dehumanizing treatment of prisoners inside North Korea, it is not hard to imagine a similar exploitation of female prisoners’ hair, as well as their labor, for the wig manufacturing industry.
The story of North Korean wig-making is a tangled one. Will wig-making be the salvation of North Korea’s foundering economy during a time when pandemic restrictions have threatened to plunge the country into a “second Arduous March?” Or does the widespread use of child and prison labor give us a moral imperative to crack down on North Korean hair products altogether, such as including hair products under UN sanctions? To what degree can we tolerate the exploitation of a vulnerable class inside North Korea so that another class of North Koreans can seize a new economic lifeline? These are the kinds of questions that can leave anyone tearing their hair out in frustration, but they deserve to be considered all the same.
North Korea’s wig industry will almost certainly continue to grow over the next few years. The majority of these wigs will pass through Chinese companies and are sold onwards to the rest of the world. At the same time, the United States is the single largest importer of hair products in the world. As the main drivers of demand, we are obligated to think more critically about where these hair products come from and whether they do suppliers more harm than good.
Views expressed in this guest column do not necessarily reflect those of Daily NK.
Rose Adams
Rose Adams is an aspiring North Korean scholar specializing in media, marketization, and women's rights in North Korea. She holds a master's degree in East Asian Studies from Stanford University.
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