Wednesday, February 20,

Influence of 20,000 Chinese in Milan

The ANNOTICO Report

 

As a follow on to My Report about the Chinese presence in Prato (near Florence) and the Fashion Industry, this article gives insight to the presence and transition/assimilation of Chinese Immigrants in Milan.

 

The New Chinatowns

 

Corriere della Sera

Marco Del Corona

19 febbraio 2008

 

No more workshops, fewer warehouses and more shops. Pilot study of 20,000 Chinese in Milan.

 

They used to run workshops but not any longer. Behind the frosted glass of the old artisan stores, they occupied the big basements below Via Morazzone and Via Bruno in Milans Paolo Sarpi district. Not any more. The Chinese workshops are no more. The workers used to sew handbags from dawn each day, beginning again at dawn the next day. Thats all over. The traditional industry that once characterised the area can no longer be found anywhere in Chinatown.

 

In 2001, there were sixteen businesses but now there are none. Via Paolo Sarpi has changed and thats one of the signs. The wholesale trade that worries residents and poses problems for the mayor, Letizia Moratti (such as the scuffles on 12 April last year) is expanding but retail shops are growing even faster. Chinatown is changing even as we speak. It is moving fast and pointing out trends, given that one quarter of all Chinese residents in Italy live in Lombardy. Now it is experiencing a sea change in services.

 

Todays snapshot is profoundly different from the picture as recently as five years ago. A new study updated to 2007, edited by Daniele Cologna with the Codici social research agency, focuses on Chinese entrepreneurship, showing that demographic data and investigations in the field are often at odds with the widespread perceptions held by Italian residents of the district and Milan. First of all, the population of the Sarpi district adjoining the city centre, and delimited by Via Canonica-Via Procaccini-Via Ceresio-Via Montello-Via Maggi, is more than 90% Italian. On 31 December 2006, only 5.8% (6.5% in 2004) of the 14,000 Chinese resident in Milan lived in the district. We should add temporary residents, explains Mr Cologna, but that means a maximum of 300 people sleeping in the dapu (dormitories), of which there are about fifteen that sleep twenty people each. Whichever way you look at it, there are fewer than a thousand Chinese residents in total. T he Chinese are concentrated elsewhere in the northern area.

 

Chinese, but not only Chinese, go to Chinatown to work. Between 1,000 and 1,500 people are employed in the area. It was in the early 1930s that the Canonica-Sarpi district received its first immigrants from Asia and when inflow from the Peoples Republic began again in 1984, that was where the newcomers went to live and work. But restructuring, gentrification and rising property prices during the 1990s put rents beyond the reach of the new arrivals, forcing textile workshops out of the district. Some moved out to the area between Milan and Monza and many others went to the Gallarate textile district.

 

Chinatown shed Chinese residents as wholesale businesses multiplied, replacing Italian-owned shops. The Chinese pay well and in cash, with money collected through guanxi, the network of family and friends that underpins traditional Chinese entrepreneurs. Today, only about one business in five in the district is Italian.

 

According to Mr Colognas report, the signs of further development are already appearing. "n increasing number of Chinese wholesalers are opting to convert their businesses into retail shops or move out" spontaneously delocalising and abandoning a district that is unsuitable for such a concentration of wholesale activity. In 2006, according to the Chamber of Commerce, only 18% of the 2,822 Chinese-owned sole traders in the province of Milan were based in Chinatown.

 

The upshot is that growth in wholesale business has been overtaken by the vibrant service and retail sectors, which now no longer restrict themselves to a Chinese clientele. Out of 482 businesses registered in Chinatown -three times as many as there were six years ago -53.3% are wholesalers, an increase of 342.2% over 2001, when there were 64.

 

But there are now 111 retailers, more than six times as many (+640% with respect to 2001, when there were 15). They cover a range of sectors, especially food, telephones and clothing but there is a wine shop, a fish shop and a fresh tofu shop. If we add other service businesses, such as bookshops, estate or travel agencies, the sixteen restaurants and the internet cafis, retail service businesses account for 41.3%.

 

Elsewhere in north Milan, Chinese have taken over Italian-owned businesses, adds Mr Cologna, and continue to run them without any overtly ethnic label. These include bars, newsstands and hairdressers. "The older wave of Chinese immigration appears to have peaked", partly because the traditional source area - the coast around Zhejiang - has a large, prosperous development hub in its main city, Wenzhou. The disappearance of the Chinese-owned workshops means that fewer Chinese workers can be employed by Chinese entrepreneurs.

 

Immigrants from the Peoples Republic now scatter across the region to work for Italians, especially immigrants from the new areas, the northern regions of Liaoning, Heilongjiang (mining areas with declining heavy industry) and the Shandong peninsula, who have no support network in Italy. The figures do not reflect a ghetto or a community that shuts itself off from society. The Chinese might misspell "hairdresser" two different ways on the same shop window, or open restaurants offering "warm food", but according to the national statistics institute ISTAT they are the second most numerous group attending Italian language courses for adults. Their passport is still Chinese but Italy beckons. Chinatown is a staging post, not a destination.

English translation by Giles Watson

 

The ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed (and are Archived) on:

Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com [Formerly Italy at St Louis] (7 years)

Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com (3 years)

Annotico Email: annotico@earthlink.net