The Chinese in Prato and the Current Outlook on the Chinese-Italian Experience

Abstract

Though the origins of Chinese migration to Italy go back almost a whole century all the way to the 1920s at least, chain migration from select areas of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a much more recent phenomenon. This process can be linked directly to the 1980s when Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reform and opening’ blasted a new path for China’s social, economic and even political development. As the PRC gradually came to embrace free market socialism, it also endeavoured to rekindle its ties with the complex world of the Chinese living overseas. It may have started as a ploy to lure successful Overseas Chinese entrepreneurs back to their motherland, or rather the zǔguó 祖国, ‘the land of the ancestors’, as it is aptly called in Chinese. But right from the start, the move to persuade former citizens of the Republic of China, stranded abroad throughout the internal strife, international conflicts and politics of seclusion that had prevented most of them from coming back for forty years, to declare themselves ‘Patriotic Overseas Chinese’ and do their part for the nation’s progress as citizens of the People’s Republic also had political motives. It was part of a much more ambitious strategy, aimed at taking away spheres of political and economic influence overseas from the rival, ‘rogue’ Republic of China government, which up to the late 1970s had been relatively unchallenged in claiming those faraway patriots as its own.

Gabi Dei Ottati has written sections ‘The rise of a Chinese fast fashion industrial district in Prato’ and ‘Explaining the exceptional development of the Chinese in Prato’. Daniele Brigadoi Cologna has written the other sections of the chapter.