Front Burner

Inside China's secretive Lop County Hair Product Industrial Park

Today on Front Burner, a look at a secretive industrial park in northwestern China that's accused of using forced Uighur labour.
A Chinese flag is seen behind a fence topped with razor wire.
This photo taken on June 4, 2019 shows the Chinese flag behind razor wire at a housing compound in Yangisar, south of Kashgar, in China's western Xinjiang region. (Photo by GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images) (Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images)

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.