Italian police officers sweep through the mosquito-infested clothes workshop, rifling through personal belongings and cracking jokes about the foreign food as six Chinese workers look on in fear.
Boxes filled with sparkling black shrugs and red party dresses spill onto the floor of the warehouse — one of 3,400 small Chinese businesses in Prato in central Italy that produce clothes for companies including Zara and H&M.
“I don’t understand what the problem is, we did everything correctly,” said Giujir, who declined to give her surname because of the police investigation, as she waited by a row of leopard-print dresses for her turn for questioning.
PHOTO: AFP
“There isn’t much work this year because of the crisis, and we have to pay the rent. I know the police have to carry out lots of controls, but it just makes the situation worse,” the worn-out 30-year-old said.
This is the first raid of the week in the historic town of Prato in Tuscany — a place local authorities see as a sort of new Chinese gangland, but immigrants defend as a revitalized hub of Italy’s flagging textile industry.
Chinese immigrants began arriving in Prato some 20 years ago, initially working for Italian companies before setting up their own businesses.
There are now about 17,000 Chinese out of a population of 188,000 — 50,000 if you include the estimated number of undocumented immigrants.
Though Chinese workers are now involved in every stage of production — even the cloth is imported because it costs 10 times less than Italian fabric — the companies can legally sell their clothes with the “Made in Italy” label.
The clothes are sold wholesale — at around 5 euros (US$6.50) for a dress or 10 euros for a coat — and bundled into vans from eastern and northern Europe that come and go seven days a week.
Few Italian shops remain in Prato’s Chinatown, located just next to the town’s historic center. The area is dotted with Chinese restaurants and supermarkets and almost all the signs are written in Chinese.
Prato’s residents last year voted in a new mayor — himself a textile business owner — who promised to tackle the Chinese community’s monopoly of the textile industry and crack down on Chinese--related crime.
Police raids in what Italian media calls “little China” have increased hugely since Mayor Roberto Cenni’s election, including investigations of mafia groups involved in money-laundering, loan-sharking and human trafficking.
The raid on Giujir’s workshop was for a much smaller infraction — workers were living illegally inside the building in unsafe and unsanitary conditions.
According to Silvia Pieraccini, journalist and author of a book on the Chinese textile industry in Prato, the workers live in the warehouses because they work 18 hours a day and sleep where they drop.
“The Chinese work a great deal. They are very quick to understand where the market is going, but they work in deplorable conditions, without contracts and in buildings that are unsafe and often unhygienic” she said.
Forty-seven-year-old Surong Badeng from Xinjiang, a police interpreter, said the Chinese community worked hard through choice not exploitation.
“They come to Italy to make money and have no time to integrate. They are ready to make huge sacrifices to get rich,” he said.
Prato’s mayor insists that the police crackdown to clean up the textile industry is about protecting exploited Chinese.
“We want to get closer to those who are being exploited in the hope that we can persuade them to rebel,” Cenni said.
That is not the way the Chinese embassy sees it.
“It’s wrong of Italy to carry out raids with helicopters and dogs. It’s completely over the top. We’re not at war, this is a civil country,” Tang Youjing, a counselor at the Chinese embassy, said in an interview.
Philippine Secretary of National Defense Gilberto Teodoro Jr on Tuesday hit out at China at an international forum after a memo asserting Beijing’s position over their longstanding maritime dispute was delivered to him while he was speaking on stage. The unusual incident was captured on video at the Seoul Defense Dialogue as the secretary was responding to a question about “gray zone” coercion in the South China Sea. The video shows what appears to be a conference staffer placing it on the table next to him while speaking. “I have a note here, I think this is from China,” he said, describing
Singapore’s air quality hit an unhealthy level yesterday, as haze from forest fires raging in Indonesia continued to spread across swathes of Southeast Asia. The city-state is currently one of the 10 most-polluted major cities in the world, coming in at third in IQAir’s ranking. Kuching, in the Malaysian part of the island of Borneo, was No. 1. A government taskforce has “activated haze response plans” for schools, workplaces and community centers, Singaporean Minister for Sustainability and the Environment Grace Fu (傅海) said in a video message on Facebook. Most people could continue essential daily activities, but the elderly or vulnerable should
PAINSTAKING PROCESS: Ice makers freeze water for up to 72 hours, replace tainted water with a fresh batch once freezing begins, and are constantly stirring In the historic Japanese city of Kanazawa, craftsmen painstakingly shape and slice blocks of ice destined to chill negronis in some of the world’s trendiest bars. The men work for Kuramoto Ice, a century-old company in Ishikawa on the Sea of Japan coast and one of dozens of Japanese firms producing ultra-clear, premium ice. This luxury product, believed by those in the industry to melt more slowly than regular blocks, is a staple of Japan’s cocktail culture, but its popularity is also spilling over to bars abroad, from the US to Australia, who pay as much as ￥200 (US$1.28) per cube. Kuramoto Ice
COMMITMENT: China could view reduced US-Seoul exercises as an opportunity to reassert itself, but the US had reassured Manila of its resolve, the defense chief said China could see recent cuts to US-South Korean military exercises as an opportunity to reassert itself in the Indo-Pacific region, Philippine Secretary of Defense Gilberto Teodoro said yesterday, though he said Washington had assured Manila that its commitments to the Philippines remained unchanged. Speaking to Reuters on the sidelines of the Seoul Defense Dialogue, Teodoro said there had been no reduction in US-Philippine military activities, and that bilateral and multilateral cooperation involving Manila continued to expand. US President Donald Trump’s decision last month to scale back military exercises with South Korea has prompted debate among security analysts over the credibility of US
RSS