June 29, 2017

 

 
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The activist Hua Haifeng, center, with his son, after he was released from a detention center in southeastern China.

Gerry Shih/Associated Press

 

DALIAN, China — Three undercover investigators who were seeking evidence of abusive labor practices in the manufacture of Ivanka Trump-branded shoes have been released on bail from a detention center in southeastern China pending a trial, the activist group that employed the investigators said on Wednesday.

 

Their release on bail represents the first confirmation that the three men have been thrust into China’s labyrinthine criminal justice system, and have not just been quietly detained for a few days. China Labor Watch, the group that sent the men into two factories that produce Ivanka Trump shoes, called for them to receive a fair trial.

 

The spokesman for the public security office in Ganzhou, where the men had been held, did not respond to telephone calls requesting comment.

 

The Ivanka Trump brand declined to comment on their release on bail, and Ms. Trump has not commented on the investigators’ detention. She has been publicly urged to do so by the best-known Western expert on China’s criminal justice system, Jerome Cohen, a professor at New York University who has specialized in the subject for a half-century. Mr. Cohen has said that public comments from her would considerably help the legal prospects for the men and the conditions under which they were held.

 

But Ms. Trump did call in a speech at the State Department on Tuesday for strong action against countries where human trafficking occurs, in conjunction with the release of a United States government report that labeled China as one such country. That report particularly criticized the treatment of migrants in China, however, and not necessarily factory workers.

 

Two of the men — Li Zhao and Hua Haifeng — worked undercover in the giant Dongguan factory of Huajian International, a Chinese company that claims to make shoes worn by one in every 10 women in the United States. The factory has made a wide range of brands of shoes, but makes only the heels of Ivanka Trump-branded footwear.

 

The heels are then shipped north to a second Huajian factory in Ganzhou that assembles the shoes. The third investigator, Su Heng, worked undercover there off and on from March until he was detained by the Ganzhou police on May 27.

 

Mr. Li and Mr. Hua were also detained in Ganzhou because they had fled there to join Mr. Su after they became worried that the police were monitoring them in Dongguan.

 

China Labor Watch contends that Huajian requires its workers to labor up to 18 hours in a day, violating China’s regulatory limits on overtime, and that they were paid less than they had been promised when they agreed to work for the company. Zhang Huarong, the company’s founder and chairman, strongly denied in a lengthy interview at the Dongguan factory in December that Huajian had violated labor laws, and company spokesmen have reiterated that position since then.

 

The Ivanka Trump brand has said that the last batch of its shoes to be made by Huajian was in March. China Labor Watch contends that further batches were scheduled to be manufactured for the brand at the end of May and in June, and that its investigators had been planning to document the production of those shoes but were detained by the authorities days beforehand.

 

 


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