Made in little Wenzhou, Italy: the latest label from Tuscany
In the third of our series on immigration in Europe, John Hooper visits the thriving, Chinese-run pronto moda workshops of Prato
You only need to walk a few hundred yards down Via Pistoiese, a narrow road out of Prato, to feel you have travelled several thousand miles. Beyond the bakery, at number 29, Italy all but evaporates.
The supermarket shelves offer dried lily flowers, bags of deep-frozen chickens' feet and jars of salted jellyfish. There is a Chinese herbalist, a Chinese jeweller, Chinese restaurants and bars, even a Chinese ice cream parlour.
According to the foreign ministry in Beijing, this Tuscan textile city and its surrounding province has the highest concentration of Chinese in any administrative district outside China itself. Silvia Pieraccini, a local journalist and author of a book, L'Assedio Cinese (The Chinese Siege), reckons there are 50,000 Chinese in Prato, and that they make up about 30% of the city's population. But no one knows, because so many – well over half, says Pieraccini – are there illegally.
All but a few are from around of Wenzhou, a port in south-east China, and are drawn to Italy by an industry created from scratch in less than 20 years. Pronto moda involves importing cheap fabric, usually from China, and getting it made up to order at breakneck speeds into high-fashion garments that are then sold with "made in Italy" labels.
At a warehouse on the Macrolotto-Iolo estate, south of Prato, boxfuls of women's tops were being carried out for a party of businessmen from Egypt.
"We get people from all over: Spain, Greece, France, Britain, even the US and Japan," said the young man in charge. The garments on the rack beside him cost between €2.80 (£2.40) and €4.20.
Those rock-bottom prices are a function of rock-bottom wages and materials. In workshops scattered around Prato, Chinese employees put in 15 to 16 hours a day in conditions and for wages no Italian would contemplate.
Yen Chow Chan, a missionary from a US-based organisation, Evangelical Mission and Seminary International, has been inside many of these workshops.
"Most employ about 10 people who don't just work in them," he says. "They live in them – they cook, eat and sleep in them." However normal that may be in China, it is against the law in Italy.
"What we have here is an organised illegal system", says Roberto Cenni, a local businessman and the city's first rightwing mayor since the second world war. "In the year to end-May, police carried out 152 inspections on Chinese-owned premises with the result that 152 firms were put under judicial administration." Cenni's slate, endorsed by Silvio Berlusconi's Freedom People movement and allied to the xenophobic Northern League, surged to victory last year on a tide of unease about the Chinese presence. The situation remains tense.
Dutch-born Yun Yin Lee, visiting Prato as a tourist, says: "The police here look at me in a way I've never been looked at in Holland." Last month saw impassioned protests from immigrant representatives after the mayor refused to declare an official day of mourning for three Chinese drowned in floods.
"We, by which I mean the Chinese, are causing a lot of problems," Chan acknowledges. But, he adds, many arise from mutual incomprehension.
"I find Italians friendly – if you speak a bit of Italian. Most of the Chinese here are from the countryside. They have difficulty with their own language, let alone someone else's. In any case, most don't have time to study.
"A lot say to me, 'Why should I integrate? I'm here for maybe 10 years to save up and send back my money so I can go back to China and enjoy it.''"
That may be the dream but, as Chan notes, the reality is often different. At the main hospital in Prato, 32% of the children born have Chinese mothers.
Whatever their legal status, those children will grow up Italians. Already, you can see around town Italianised Chinese teenagers, the girls particularly conspicuous in their chic, often provocatively cut outfits and heavy makeup.
"The ones who are born here dress like Italians, eat like Italians and don't speak much Chinese," says Hu Qui Lin.
Hu is famous in Prato for being the only Chinese company owner (among between 4,000 and 5,000) to have joined Confindustria, the Italian bosses' federation. His managing director, like many of his other employees, is Italian. Giancarlo Maffei is also an adviser to the centre-left provincial government.
"The mayor has concentrated on respect for the rules. But he'd do better to open a dialogue with the Chinese and try to convince them of the need for legality," Maffei says.
"The problem is: who do I talk to in a context of systematic illegality?" says Cenni. "There are lots of people who want to be considered [representatives of the Chinese community]. But we have no guarantee these people are 'clean'."
Maffei says the provincial government has formed a joint working party "and is trying to advance a dialogue, albeit with problems". Pieraccini says those problems have included the arrest of some of the Chinese representatives.
Ironically, what the two communities do is richly compatible. Prato's traditional industries, which are in sharp decline, are the manufacture of yarn and fabric. Pronto moda does not compete with either but could use the output of both.
It may not help community relations that the Italian factories are closing down largely because of competition from China, but even Cenni says: "If we could put together the garment manufacturing abilities of the Chinese with the textile production abilities of the Italians, we could create a fashion centre here."
Maffei argues that this is starting to happen. "Tens of millions of metres of fabric are already being bought by the Chinese from Italian firms," he says.
In October, a delegation from Wenzhou signed an agreement with the provincial authorities to encourage firms back in China to buy high-quality textiles from Prato and wine from the nearby Carmignano area. The ceremony was attended by Mayor Cenni, but he declined an invitation to put his own signature to the document.
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