Ahead of Breaking News, a Shoe Story That Fits<br />Several months later, with my Huajian reporting on the back burner as I continued to explore other Trump-branded merchandise in China, we learned<br />that a New York-based advocacy group, China Labor Watch, had coincidentally sent in undercover investigators to look at the company’s shoe production.<br />By KEITH BRADSHERJUNE 2, 2017<br />A labor advocacy group announced on Tuesday evening in Hong Kong<br />that one of its undercover investigators, who had gone missing while probing the production of Ivanka Trump-branded shoes in a Chinese factory, had been detained by the police, and two more of its investigators had disappeared in China.<br />Within a day and a half, The New York Times had published two in-depth articles, one on the disappearances<br />and the other on how Ivanka Trump shoes are made, complete with numerous photos from inside the factory.<br />But the workers, and later a co-owner of Xuankai, confirmed something else: The<br />factory no longer made Ivanka Trump shoes, and had not done so for many months.<br />He shared some troubling news: One of his undercover investigators, Hua Haifeng, had tried to cross the border the day before to meet him<br />but had been stopped from leaving mainland China by border police.<br />On a bullet train to Guangzhou — the region’s hub — from Wuhan in central China, where I had been reporting<br />on China’s solar power industry, I began checking online for factories that produced Trump merchandise.
