Wigmaker to the world

An enormous globe-spanning network of merchants, manufacturers and retailers has turned China into the world's largest wig, toupee and hair exporting power


Sun Jianli emerged from a back room of his home clutching a small package containing five three-foot-long tresses of jet-black human hair, known in these parts as "people fur.''

"Girls don't grow it long like this anymore,'' the 40-year-old farmer said as he fingered the locks, each held together with girlish elastic bands. "I have a confidential source.''

Fuelled by an estimated 40,000 dealers like Sun, who scour China and the world for cheap locks, the hair industry is an example of how this country — with its rock-bottom labour costs and unrelenting entrepreneurial spirit — is becoming a major player in the world economy.

Last year, China supplied 96 per cent of the 10.7 tons of hair imported by the United States, according to statistics from the US Commerce Department. Ten years ago, South Korea was the United States' biggest source.

Chinese importers have also bought up most of India's hair supply — 3.3 tons so far this year, collected mostly from temples where pilgrims shave their heads as part of a purification ritual. That hair, which is considered the best in the world, is shipped to China, treated in one of about 200 hair processing plants and re-exported to the United States and Europe.

"India's light industry is still light-years behind China,'' said C.K. Chao, president of the Asia Hair and Beauty Association and a fifth-generation wig manufacturer. "They just don't have factories for things like this.''

China entered the international hair business in the 19th century, when merchants in the eastern coastal city of Qingdao began shipping products to Europe using hair harvested from surrounding Shandong province, Chao said. Chao's great-great-grandfather was a trader.

After China's revolution of 1949, wigs and other fashion accessories were rejected as bourgeois.
But even at the height of Maoist fervour in the 1960s, many Chinese still wanted to make money.

When US first lady Jacqueline Kennedy set off a wig boom among American women seeking to imitate her bouffant hairdos, it resonated as far away as Shandong.

Chao's father and other traders had fled China for Hong Kong, taking the business with them. Now they began collecting hair from their home towns in Shandong and exporting it to Italy and Indonesia, where it was processed for American wigs.

"Of course there were US sanctions on China, but we can tell the story now,'' Chao said with a chuckle. "Everyone wanted wigs and there was suddenly a hair shortage.

"So Chinese hair sent to Indonesia became Indonesian hair and Chinese hair sent to Italy became Italian hair.''

By the 1980s, the wave Kennedy started had receded. Synthetic fibres from Japan also took a big bite out of China's wig market. "By the 1980s, the only thing left was toupees,'' Chao said. "Things were slow.''

But as wigs went out of fashion for Caucasian women, a new fad swept through the African-American community: hair extensions, braids, weaves and tiny curls. China began exporting hair to the United States and Africa in quantity in the late 1990s. Last year, China exported three tons of hair to Congo and two tons to Nigeria, among other nations, according to export statistics.

But Chinese dealers seeking to sell the product directly to African Americans came up against another challenge: immigrants from South Korea who run 48 importing companies and an estimated 10,000 retail outlets in African-American communities, according to industry statistics.

"We're trying to move up a step and get involved in retailing, where the real money is made,'' said Yi Liqun, a government official in Juancheng. "But the Koreans have a monopoly.''

Yi himself wears a toupee. "I used to wear Indian hair, but I decided to buy locally,'' he said, primping his hairpiece ever so slightly. "It's taken years off my age, and I'm a walking advertisement, too.''

A dingy county seat in southern Shandong, 550 miles south of Beijing, Juancheng has been a centre for China's hair trade since the early 1980s. State-owned firms used to dominate the market; now not one state firm is still in business.

In Juancheng county, 30,000 people work in the hair industry, either traveling around China and the world to buy hair or helping to process it in the county's 84 factories, Shi said.
Hair-related industries generate one-third of the county's revenue, he said.

Over the past several years, profits for everyone, including Sun, have been high. Since 1990 the price of hair has quadrupled. And as the demand for extensions has spread to Caucasian women, the price of natural hair longer than 16 inches has jumped 50 per cent in just a year, to about $50 a pound, Chao said. "I'm going to hold on to these babies for a while,'' Sun said, tugging at the lengthy locks, "because I know the price is going up.''

© Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service