I cinesi among others: the contested racial perceptions among Chinese migrants in Italy

ABSTRACT

This article examines the vernacular system of racial designations and perceptions deployed by Chinese migrants in Italy for making sense of the pluralistic and hierarchical racial reality in which they live. Data primarily came from 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Bologna from 2014 to 2015 and the subsequent annual visits until the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Focusing on three major racial labels, it sheds light on the ways in which Chinese diasporic subjects produce a racialized vocabulary related to racism and practice racial formations in transnational contexts. Their localised racial ideology reflects their predicament of being simultaneously both socially vulnerable and economically privileged. It paradoxically both reproduces and negotiates the preexisting Italian racial hierarchy that also reflects globally circulating racial hierarchies, while intersecting with their own understandings of civility and modernity. The perspectives of Chinese migrants who, themselves subject to racialisation, also racialise others reveal a contested bottom-up narrative of racial formation in a European society experiencing rapid demographic change. This ethnographic study thus challenges the existing narratives of racialisation and immigration beyond Eurocentric frameworks.

KEYWORDS:

• Racialisation
• racism
• migration
• Chinese diaspora
• Italy

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to all my interlocutors in Italy who shared their lives and stories with me and especially to the two Italian families who hosted me during fieldwork. I thank David Kertzer and Katherine Mason for their generous feedback and revision comments throughout the production of this article, Andrea Flores and the Migration Working Group at the PSTC for revision comments, Joseph Bosco and Sealing Cheng for early comments, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Michael White, Asher Colombo for early suggestions and discussions, and James Wang for encouragement, suggestions, and editing. I am also grateful to The Chinese University of Hong Kong and the IJURR Foundation for their generous financial supports, and Antonella Ceccagno at the University of Bologna for hosting me during fieldwork.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Italian term immigrato and its plural form immigrati is a racialised term widely used in public discourses in Italy to refer to non-Italian ethnic groups, regardless of the person’s self-identification, citizenship, birthplace or how long ago his or her ancestors settled in Italy. In this article, I use the term ‘immigrant(s)’ to emphasise the attribute of otherness in Italian society regardless of the subjects’ actual citizenship when I discuss Italy’s anti-immigrant politics, while in most other cases, I use the term ‘migrant(s)’ to generally refer to people who move from one place to another (Glick Schiller 2015).

2 The influx of Chinese citizens has slowed down after Italy’s economic recession of 2008. After that point, the increase of Chinese citizens is primarily a result of both immigration for family reunion and the new birth of Chinese residents in Italy given that the Italian-born children of foreign citizens do not obtain Italian citizenship at birth.

3 People from Wenzhou and neighbouring areas made up more than 90% of all Chinese populations in the 1980s and between 70% and 80% in the 2010s (Latham and Wu 2013).

4 During this period, Italy’s immigration law prohibited self-employment for new immigrants originating from countries where Italian citizens did not enjoy reciprocal agreements, China included.

5 My long-term fieldwork did not uncover any evidence for the existence of a wide-reaching organisation of ‘Chinese mafia’ operating behind Chinese mass migration and small businesses run by Chinese families in Italy. This is consistent with the findings of an earlier investigation, which concluded that forced labour did not typically apply to Chinese mass migration to Prato, Italy (Ceccagno et al 2008).

6 Undocumented migrants are not included in these numbers. The estimates of the total number of Chinese residents in Prato that includes both documented and undocumented migrants was between 30,000 and 40,000, about twice the official figure, in the mid 2010s (Lathan and Wu 2013, 110). However, my research also showed that many Chinese undocumented migrants have legalised their residents over the years. Thus, this legalisation process has also contributed to the increase of the current registered number of Chinese residents in Prato. Meanwhile, the mass migration from China has slowed, as I mentioned earlier in the article.

7 According to my Chinese interlocutors, they encountered heiren much less than banhei in general and had rather limited interactions with heiren in their everyday life. This is also consistent with Italy’s racial and demographic compositions. While banhei are frequently discussed in their everyday conversations and Chinese media, heiren were not given as much attention.

8 The local authorities have largely intensified security measures and surprise inspections and stimulated a new inspection regime after the tragedy of a factory fire that took the lives of seven Chinese migrants in Prato in 2013. Krause (2018) noted that the tragedy brought together an assembly of the xenophobic right-wing party members and the liberal centre-left party members, both of which positioned themselves as social justice supporters and accused Chinese migrants of exploitive working conditions and a violation of human rights. Yet, as Krause (2018) also point out, this tragedy is highly politicised and became an excuse to justify selective inspections on Chinese migrants and their businesses.