Report: Beijing May Be Passing Off North Korean Fake Eyelashes as ‘Made in China’

Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported on Friday that some fake eyelashes shipped in “Made in China” packaging may actually be made in North Korea and shipped through China, thus bypassing United States sanctions.

“North Korean trading companies produce artificial eyelashes using raw materials imported from Chinese companies, then they sell them back to companies in China. North Korean workers receive 1 Chinese yuan for every three artificial eyelash products they make,” an anonymous Chinese trader told RFA.

One yuan works out to about 14 cents, a pittance of a wage for the North Koreans, who allegedly also produce wigs and fake beards for illegal export. The trader said some North Korean workers crank out over 100 fake eyelashes a day.

The Chinese trader produced a shipping document that showed a North Korean company shipping 190,000 sets of fake eyelashes to the Chinese city of Donggang, from where they could be reexported as if they were Chinese products. The shipment would have fetched the North Korean company a profit of about $8,800, most of which would be seized by the cash-strapped tyranny and funneled into its war machine, including its nuclear missile program.

North Korean items could very easily disappear into the river of products flowing out of China. A single region within China’s Shandong province produces about 70 percent of the artificial eyelashes in the world, and a sizable portion of Shandong’s prodigious output could be tainted with North Korean materials and labor.

Business is booming so much that North Korean workers serving as virtual indentured servants for other Chinese industries are being forced to work overtime producing fake eyelashes. North Korean prisoners are also forced to make wigs, beards, and eyelashes. 

Enforcement action against these dubious exports seems rare; RFA mentioned a landmark million-dollar fine against an American company for importing North Korean fake eyelashes through China, but that was in 2019.

Cosmetic products are a fairly small part of North Korea’s dogged efforts to defy one of the toughest sanctions regimes the United States has ever imposed. Russia has allegedly helped North Korea export coal in defiance of sanctions, for example. South Korean companies illegally purchased some of that coal, prompting Seoul to crack down hard on the shadowy trade.

Chinese companies have frequently been implicated in North Korea’s sanctions-busting schemes. Sometimes illicit goods are transferred between ships at sea, effectively laundering North Korea’s products through China’s gigantic export system.

The most troubling method Pyongyang uses to circumvent sanctions and ensure a stream of foreign cash is selling North Korean labor abroad, essentially selling its workers as slaves. Despite several crackdowns on the practice over the years, North Korean serfs can still be found toiling in Russian logging camps, Chinese factories, Middle Eastern construction sites, and Eastern European shipyards.

The regime in Pyongyang takes their families hostage to ensure the obedience of the workers and keep them from defecting, although quite a few of them still run away, bringing stories of their hideous working conditions to human rights organizations.

The past few months have seen growing concerns that North Korea is selling arms to Russia for use in Ukraine – shipments of older gear that Russia might be paying for by promising to export more advanced technology to the North Koreans.

North Korea also gets a good deal of foreign currency by simply stealing it. Cybersecurity firms estimate North Korean hackers stole at least $600 million in cryptocurrency last year, accounting for nearly a third of all crypto theft worldwide.

The intense secrecy of the North Korean regime makes it difficult to tell exactly how much damage sanctions have done to Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions, or whether the grinding poverty of the North Korean people is threatening the Kim dynasty’s grip on power.

The East Asia Forum pointed out in July that while North Korea’s evasion tactics make it seem as if the sanctions regime is leaking like a sieve – all the way down to thousands of dollars in illicit profits harvested from selling fake eyelashes – the sanctions still impose a substantial “risk premium” on Pyongyang’s revenue stream. There are good reasons to believe sanctions have dramatically reduced the financial power of the dictatorship.

“The U.N. Panel of Experts estimated, for example, that North Korea earned around US$370 million from sanctions-violating coal exports in 2019. This is only a fraction of the US$1.19 billion it earned from such exports in 2016, before the harsher sanctions,” the East Asia Forum wrote.