Cultures, economies clash in Milan's Chinatown district
Crackdown on pushcarts reflects wider tensions
MILAN -- A battle of cultures, businesses, and lifestyles is being waged in Milan's Chinatown, and has been escalating in recent weeks. The symbols of the war -- and its unlikely booty -- are the blue metal pushcarts that the many Chinese wholesale clothing merchants have long used to ferry huge volumes of cheap shirts, shoes, and jeans, to the idling vans and cars of local buyers.
The owner of a store called Sea of the East said seven or eight of his pushcarts have been confiscated and he has paid countless fines to get merchandise back.
"It has been really bad the last six months. How can we work?" said the owner, a Chinese citizen who has lived legally in Italy for eight years, but who would identify himself only as Chen for fear of harassment.
Despite a supposed truce last week, a young Chinese worker leaving the store with a cart was surrounded by half a dozen police officers within a block and fined 40 euros, or $55, paid on the spot.
The pushcart war began with complaints from local Italians, which prompted the city administration, elected last year, to crack down on practices that had long been tolerated and that are at the core of the Chinese businesses. The pushcarts, the Italians say, are a hazard for old people and schoolchildren.
The waiting cars and vans, they note, are private vehicles that are not licensed to ferry commercial goods. The police began to hand out fines -- lots of them.
And while the politics here on Via Sarpi is local, there are also larger issues at play. Such tensions are growing in many countries, specialists say, as Europe struggles to accept and, perhaps, integrate burgeoning Chinese communities that are increasingly prosperous and empowered.
"This used to be a Milanese neighborhood with stores to buy thread, bread, electrical things, the kind of stores neighborhoods have," said Corrado Borrelli, a business consultant and longtime resident of the neighborhood that centers on a street named after Paolo Sarpi, a 16th-century statesman. "It's not just about the carts. The Chinese have taken over the neighborhood, they have stolen spaces from Italians, but they haven't developed relationships with the residents."
"They shop at their own stores -- their culture closes them off," he added. "And there are small things, like they speak too loudly."
Earlier this month, long- simmering tensions burst into the open when 300 Chinese protesters clashed with the police on the streets. The protesters carried the Chinese flag -- for lack, they said, of a more appropriate banner for the rally.
Although leaders of the Chinese community have since met with the mayor to try to resolve the issue, resentment is rampant among the Chinese, who feel they have been unfairly made targets, and solutions are far away.
"They held up the flag because it is a symbol of belonging to something," said Angelo Ou, a prominent local businessman whose father moved to Italy in the 1930s.
Ou was one of four representatives of the Chinese community who met with city officials. He noted that the protests had caught the interest of the Chinese government and that Premier Wen Jiabao had reportedly requested a report on the riot and on the situation of the Chinese in Italy.
"In other years, this would have been seen as a minor moment, but it's significant that even Chinese officials addressed what happened," said Daniele Cologna, a sociologist who teaches Chinese at the University of Pavia.
Italian officials have played down the events, explaining that the growth in the wholesale trade in a historic neighborhood of tight-knit streets necessitated greater control of the area.
"There was no reason to enforce the laws before," said Riccardo de Corato, the deputy mayor of Milan. "That changed over the last four to five years, when retail businesses became wholesale. We're not passing new laws targeting Chinese, we're just enforcing the traffic codes."
He said he was "surprised that within minutes they were on the streets, with flags and megaphones."
"All for a fine," he added, "18 people ended up in the hospital."
Still, Corato said, a new type of young Chinese immigrant had "upset the equilibrium" in the area, where Chinese and Italians had previously coexisted, "upsetting the unwritten rules of nearly a century."
The new immigrants, he added, "don't learn Italian" and tend to isolate themselves. And criminal gangs of Chinese youth are on the rise, he said.
Chinese have been moving to Europe, and to Italy, in growing numbers since the 1930s, said Ou, who has a Chinese father and an Italian mother. Then, as now, the vast majority came from the area around Wenzhou, a city on the southeastern coast.
Through the 1990s, the Chinese opened small factories -- mostly leather and textile workshops staffed by immigrants -- or worked in restaurants. As is the case with Italians who migrated to the United States a century ago, one family member followed another, asking little in the way of public assistance.
"Italy was transformed from an emigration country to an immigration country," said Arturo Lanzani, a specialist in urban planning at the Milan Politecnico. "In Via Sarpi in the 1990s, we had a case of cohabitation where the Italian majority well tolerated the immigrant minority, which was mostly Chinese."
But that has changed dramatically in the past five years, Lanzani said. As it became easier for Chinese to leave their homeland, numbers swelled. Officially, the Chinese community in Milan numbers 13,000 in a city of 1.3 million, but some officials say that, including illegal immigrants, the number could be nearly double that. 