Ninja Turtles Hatched In Secret Chinese Sweatshop

SHENZHEN, China - Call it the Ancestral Sewer. Call it Mondo Beyondo. Call it the Secret Turtle Base. Call it what you will, it lies at the end of a narrow dirt road right in the middle of China's national sweatshop, the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, in a nine-story, nondescript brown building.

This is where those very radical dudes, those "Heroes in a Half-Shell," the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, are hatched.

Originating as comic-book characters dreamed up by two cartoonists in Massachusetts, the toy turtles treasured by American tots are now made in China, along with a huge portion of other playthings sold in the United States. And in China's closed society, industrial details are top secret, even when the industry turns out toys.

The turtle factory is so secret that the price of admission is twofold: no photos and no identifying the place by name. Suffice it to say that it lies in southern Shenzhen, near the Honey Lake Resort.

An almost military security clamps the place tight in steely jaws. Guards on every floor jump to attention as the assistant factory manager, May S.M. Wong, passes by.

Wong represents Playmates Inc., the Hong Kong partner in this joint-venture factory.

It's Christmas already in the sultry heat of July. Outside, luxuriant litchi trees and rainwashed ficuses droop in the doldrums of summer. Inside, Diamond fans, made in China, whir overhead as Cantonese workers hunch over their tables, grim-faced, white-smocked and nimble-fingered, paid by the piece.

Some 1,500 people work here, far more women than men, all ex-farmers. They earn $72 a month, more than schoolteachers. The assembly-line belt rolls at the rate of a foot every two seconds, and toys take shape along it.

An enormous segment of the world's toy industry is rooted in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, a fenced-off, 387-square-kilometer belt where controlled capitalism is practiced in Communist China.

Taking advantage of Hong Kong's remorseless production techniques and China's cheap labor, an array of toys - everything from Hasbro's G.I. Joe ("The Real American Hero") to Coleco's Cabbage Patch Dolls - has poured out of this Santa Claus satchel in southeastern China.

In the showroom, the turtles reign supreme. Here, fresh and shiny with heroic snarls, are the little terrapins who were transformed by radioactive slime into martial-arts heroes and became one of the greatest successes of the toy industry. Here, too, are their even more lucrative vehicles and bases: the Sewer Cruiser, the Turtlecycle, the Secret Turtle base, the Turtlecopter, Shredder's Technodrome and every other item relating to these immensely profitable characters.

The turtles have made toy-marketing history and elevated the Hong Kong toy and movie industry to world status. In August 1990, Playmates announced a record interim profit of $45.5 million. The firm more than quintupled its turnover that year.

The film "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" opened in April 1990. Produced and distributed by Hong Kong's Golden Harvest Studios, it cost $15 million to make and scooped up $25 million at the box office in one weekend, making it the biggest non-summer, non-Thanksgiving opening in U.S. history. A sequel was released this year.

On the day of this visit, however, the plastic turtles themselves were not in production. Today it's Robin Hood, from the new Kevin Costner movie.

Walk down the line and see the fantasy coalesce:

Most of the larger color details are spray-painted on by hand. A brown plastic leg, for example, will be clamped in a special hand-held mold that leaves the boot exposed. Pfft! Instant gray boots.

A stamping engine, made in China, is used to paint on detailed eyes and lips. The head is placed in a tiny cradle and, ka-chunk! Suddenly it is alive.

Next, the pieces are fitted together, arms and legs inside two halves of a torso, front and back. The young woman who does this has to press her thumb and forefinger together thousands of times a day. She passes the loosely assembled torso with its waggling limbs to another worker, who sticks it in a Branson machine press. Poomp! The torso is tightly knit together.

What sets this place apart is the product: toys. The sight of intent, frowning young men and women hammering, twisting, pinching, sewing, cutting and stapling furiously, paid by the piece and paced by the moving belt, all to make toys, the stuff of happy play, of starry Christmas and idle delight - this makes the sweat seem twice as salty.

The Western onlooker cannot help but feel a pang of guilt, as though he had trespassed into a meat-packing plant after eating a hamburger.

Yet there are hundreds of thousands of Chinese who would eagerly work here. In the nearby city of Guangzhou, the labor bureau spent $100,000 last year for train and bus tickets to send back illegal migrant workers from inland provinces.

The 23-inch, four-color, huggable soft Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle doll - a green sort of teddy bear - is being stuffed and stitched together at one end of one floor.

Sewing machines whir, huge plastic sackfuls of snow-white Chinese cotton, shipped to Hong Kong, milled and washed and sent back over to Shenzhen, are being stuffed into the gradually evolving bodies.

On the floor below, very near the ground, are the massive orange injection molding machines, about the size of a car. These are the hot forges of imagination, bubbling within, shaping the primordial ooze of toy creation.