NARRATIVES TRAVELLING FROM THE LOCAL TO THE GLOBAL -ANTONELLA CECCAGNO, Dispense di Storia Cinese

Scarica NARRATIVES TRAVELLING FROM THE LOCAL TO THE GLOBAL -ANTONELLA CECCAGNO e più Dispense in PDF di Storia Cinese solo su Docsity! CHAPTER NINETEEN NARRATIVES TRAVELLING FROM THE LOCAL TO THE GLOBAL ANTONELLA CECCAGNO! 1. Introduction New Chinese migrants have been attracted into the Italian fashion districts since the late 1980s. In the fashion industry they have followed a unique pattern of emplacement as contracting entrepreneurs and as workers overwhelmingly employed by co-national contractors. In 2009 non-EU entrepreneurs in the main Italian fashion districts made up 39 per cent of the total and Chinese entrepreneurs alone amounted to 37 per cent (Osservatorio 2010). On 1 December 2013, in Prato, a medium-size Tuscan city famous for its quintessential Italian industrial district, seven Chinese migrants died in a fire that swept through the building where they worked and lived (as I will show below, among the Chinese contractors active in the fashion industry it is not uncommon for employers to offer board and lodging to workers on the workshop premises). The fire in Prato attracted headlines all over the world. Prato is one of the areas in Europe with the highest Chinese population density. It is the only place in Italy where, from the second half of the 1990s, the Chinese migrants in Prato were able to upscale to the role of manufacturers, relying on co-national sewing workshops as contractors. Narratives Travelling from the Local to the Global 393 Prato has become the centre of a Chinese-dominated fast-fashion value chain that by now stretches from China and Turkey as the sourcing areas, to most European countries as the buyers of low-end garments. Native entrepreneurs, instead, dominate the local textile industry, which has contributed to the international success of the Italian fashion industry. In the last few decades, however, the textile industry has been experiencing an unprecedented crisis due to increased global competition. Scholars have proposed three links between media and migration, based on three types of media: global media, host-country media, and media produced by migrant groups or transmitted from the country of origin (King and Wood 2001). Instead of simply focusing on the three different sites where competing discourses on migrants are produced, this chapter undertakes to highlight the dynamic relationship between, and the mutual constitution of, media representation strategies on migrants on different scales. However, I do not limit the discussion to media representation choices: I attempt to connect them with the policies and the relevant interests at stake. Moreover, I offer a new concept to the strategic narrative field as theorized by Miskimmon et al. (2013) and Roselle e? al (2014). These scholars focus their analytical attention on how political actors seek to shape order through narrative projection. They theorize strategic narrative as a new means of understanding soft power. While the main focus of the strategic narrative theory is international relations, their conceptualization also takes into account dynamics unfolding on the local scale and their interactions with the state’s strategic narratives. These authors argue that a compelling narrative can be a power resource as people may be drawn to certain explanations that describe the specifics of a policy (Roselle et al., 2014, 74). In this way, others can be influenced in a strategic sense. Furthermore, these authors distinguish between different types of strategic narratives. First are International System Narratives that describe how the world is structured, who the players are, and how it works. Identity Narratives are about “the character of nations and their people, with their distinctive values”. Finally, Issue Narratives “set out why a policy is needed and (normatively) desirable and how it will be successfully implemented”. I will use these concepts, when pertinent, and explain the factors that contribute to transforming a locally devised policy on the Chinese migrants and the relevant narratives into the dominant narratives at the national and global scales. Roselle ef a/. (2014) also argue that narratives employed on one geographic scale may affect narratives on other scales and thus constrain future policy choices and behaviours. My paper takes this concept one step 396 Chapter Nineteen 3. Global Media Endorse the “Deterritorialized Regime” Narrative The international media’s framing of the issue followed in the footsteps of the Italian press (see for instance the BBC coverage, BBC 2013). Echoing the dominant Italian narrative, the international press reported on the “Italian officials’ inability to persuade the Chinese government to address the growing crime problem, the unsafe factories” in Prato (White 2013). The narrative thus conflated different issues including the role of local/national institutions and bilateral relations between Italy and China. Moreover, it conveyed a paroxysmal message as it suggested that China as the sending country, instead of Italy as the place where the Chinese migrants live and work, should manage and put an end to a working regime that is embedded in the Italian fashion districts, as I will discuss below. Moreover, an article on the webpage of the Harvard Edmond Safra Center for Ethics stated: The Chinese Consul General from nearby Florence put in an appearance, shedding a tear as she proclaimed the Chinese government’s newfound desire to change the brutal exploitation of workers that has been Chinese factories’ modus operandi in Prato for the last 15 years (White 2013). Thus, the article suggests that China agrees to put the blame on migrants from China for a production regime that is widely adopted in Italy and to take action against the brutal exploitation of Chinese workers in Italy. Were it true, such an approach would imply a significant departure from China’s longstanding strategic support for its migrants (Barabantseva 2005). In Italy this support had become evident in 2007 when the Chinese migrants in Milan had marched carrying the Chinese national flag in a parade against the local government’s discriminating attitude towards Chinese businesses (see Di Castro and Vicziany 2009; Zhang 2014). On that occasion, the Chinese media conveyed the Chinese government’s support for the protesters. China’s support for its migrants in Italy was evident again in 2010, when the Consul General in Florence protested that the inspections on Chinese businesses in Prato-with helicopters flying over the inspected premises and policemen with police dogs-resembled “Nazi methods of control” (Fedeli 2010; for an ethnographic account of the Chinese Consul General’s approach to the city’s institutions’ framing of the Chinese migrants present in Prato, see Raffaetà and Baldassar 2015). In point of fact, in the aftermath of the fire in Prato, the Chinese Narratives Travelling from the Local to the Global 397 Consul General merely urged the representatives of the Chinese associations in Prato “to eliminate potential risks and put an end to fires and other tragedies” (Povoledo 2013). Moreover, the line taken by national and international newspapers conveyed the message that the Chinese workers are coerced into brutal exploitation. In the New York Times, Povoledo (2013) spoke of “outrage at the Dickensian conditions under which they [the Chinese migrants] lived and worked.” Evidence of extremely negative media framing and tone is provided by the Harvard University*s online article mentioned above, which offers a gruesome story of workers” dead bodies being abandoned on the streets in Prato after “they died of exhaustion”: One former worker I spoke to said at her factory the owner put workers in the dumpster wrapped in a plastic bag when they died. [...] Anything is possible in the Prato factories. I suggest that this approach fails to fully address the complexity of labour, exploitation, and workers” agency in an era of globalization “, as will be seen below. To sum up, a locally forged narrative, framing the Chinese migrants’ economic activities in Prato as not being grounded in the local context, travels unchallenged from the local to the global. Considerations on State sovereignty are ignored: Chinese entrepreneurship abroad is construed as a responsibility of the sending country, which should discipline off-the- books and so-called criminal practices by its citizens in a foreign country. Moreover, the media on different geographic scales do not seek to understand in what ways the local framing of the issue reflects particular biases and defends specific interests. In the next section, I will tackle this issue. 4. The Policy-strategic Narrative Nexus The narrative spread in the aftermath of the tragedy, travelling from the local to other scales, did not arise out of nothing. To the contrary, the tragedy in Prato created the conditions for more explicitly bringing to the 398 Chapter Nineteen national scale a dominant discourse on Chinese migrants” entrepreneurship that had been shaped in Prato long before the fire. Local policies of exclusion, in many cases targeting migrants, have become a prominent feature in many Italian cities since 2008 and 2009, When the Italian government introduced the so-called Security Package, i.e. a set of norms granting more power to the cities’ mayors on issues of law and order (Ambrosini and Caneva 2012). One year ahead of the new national approach to security, a “Pact for security in Prato” had been signed in Prato by the Mayor of the left-wing local government, the representatives of the provincial authorities of Prato, the regional authorities of Tuscany and the Italian Ministry of the Interior. The pact addressed and adopted measures against 1) urban degradation; 2) criminality and deviant behaviour; 3) Chinese enterprises. The document claimed that too many Chinese businesses are active in Prato and often operate off the books. They therefore bring the city security problems that need to be addressed by specific measures”. Policies are often analysed as windows onto political processes (Shore and Wright 2011). Feldman (2011), instead, challenges the common sense of policy. He argues that policy has agency and is itself a process that shifts action and creates new problem fields that were not there before. It creates subjects and objects of power. Feldman’s conceptualization of policy is a very useful analytical framework for shedding light on the dynamics surrounding the signing and implementation of the “Pact for security in Prato.” This pact is an interesting example of how disparate domains — urban degeneration, deviant behaviour and Chinese migrant entrepreneurship —merge into a bigger problem. By signing the pact, the actors constitute new problem fields that were not there before. The previous approach to migrant entrepreneurship is transformed. In fact, a new discriminating logic emerges by reworking some of the tropes of entrepreneurship. In Prato a divide is created and institutionalized between native entrepreneurs on the one hand, whose business enterprise is legitimate and supported by the institutions, and migrant entrepreneurship on the other hand, which is transformed into a security concern. In Rosselle and colleagues’ terms, this could be described as the “Issue Narrative” of native textile entrepreneurs as the only ones entitled to embody the (local) fashion industry. The anti-Chinese narrative, already widespread in the early years of the new century, is more explicitly set out Narratives Travelling from the Local to the Global 401 been able to sell his family business when the crisis of the Prato textile industry was only just starting to loom on the horizon, Nesi sets the events in his book in Prato (while insisting it is not Prato). Yet, and interestingly, in Nesi’s narrative Prato and Italy are conflated. The thrust of Nesi”s thesis is that the failure of most small Italian firms is to be blamed on globalization-with its Italian cantors-and on Chinese migrants’ entrepreneurship (see also Zhang 2014). His acclaimed book goes hand in hand with, and sums up in narrative form, the conceptualization put forth by some industrial-district scholars that China and Chinese migrants are to be blamed for the impoverishment of the city and its loss of international status. This discourse, which places the blame for the decline of the district on Chinese migrants, provides the theoretical basis for the policy “Pact for security in Prato” that criminalized Chinese entrepreneurship. As discussed above, Prato is the only fashion area where Chinese migrants do not directly contribute to the wealth of the native entrepreneurs in the fashion industry. Why is it, then, that a strategic narrative that is the product of a particular local situation heavily influences the framing of the narrative on Chinese migrants’ entrepreneurship in the entire Italian fashion industry on different scales? Below I offer some explanation. 7. China as a Tentacled Alien Manufacturing activities and in particular the fashion industry remain a pillar of the Italian economy (Fortis 2005). In the early 20005, well ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, a ravaging economic crisis had hit not only Prato but the entire fashion industry in Italy. Meanwhile, China was gaining ground globally. As pointed out by Gereffi and Frederick (2010), China is the big winner in the two crises of the global textile and clothing value chain: the WTO phase-out of the quota system for textiles and apparel in 2005—which provided access for poor, small economies to the markets of industrialized countries-and the more recent economic recession. Dunford and his colleagues (2013) show a direct correlation between the rise of China and the fall of Italy in textile and clothing production. Besides, research has pointed to the growing specialization of China’s and increasingly Turkey”s economies in higher- end items, once mainly exported by Italy. This, in turn, results in the squeezing out of Italy"s domestic manufacturers from this segment of the industry (Dunford ef a/. 2013, 15). Thus, China is a stiff competitor of 402 Chapter Nineteen Italy in the very production sectors in which Italy boasted leadership and which are still vital for the Italian economy. These dynamics involving Italy and China help explain some attitudes prevailing in the country. Expectations that the Chinese “would rush out to buy Italian style” (Nesi 2012) prevailing in the 1980s have quickly been replaced by anger and fear towards the dreadful competitor. China has increasingly been narrated in Italy as responsible for Italy's impoverishment. The widespread perception of a tentacled China that has devastating effects on naîve Italy and the rest of the world is rendered with an explicit metaphor in the movie The arrival of Wang by the Moretti brothers, released in 2011, where an octopus-like alien, whose name is Wang and who only speaks Chinese, arrives in Italy and from this country destroys planet Earth. The movie ends with a close-up of the wounded young Italian-Chinese interpreter who had naîvely trusted the alien. Miskimmon et al. (2014) argue that we can explain why some narratives are convincing and even attractive by singling out convergence between narratives on the different geographic scales or types of narrative. The case in question is a clear example of narratives becoming more convincing as they resonate with narratives on other scales. Ultimately, I argue, it is these multiple forms of convergence that enable a locally forged set of narratives to easily travel across geographic scales. Over a few years, in fact, a number of narratives have contributed to building a bridge between the local and the national: the “double challenge” conceptualization put forth in academics in 2009 as an Issue Narrative on the (local) fashion industry being “under attack” from China and its migrants (Dei Ottati 2009); the “Story of my people” (Nesi 2011), focusing on small entrepreneurs wiped out by globalization, set in Prato but narrated as if it were the story of the entire Italian nation and therefore as a national Identity Narrative; the public statement by the President of the regional authorities of Tuscany in 2013 that strengthens a discourse on the Chinese migrants as being connected with China rather than embedded in the locality. As they resonate with, and thus strengthen, one another, these narratives come to form a narrative block that gains internal coherence and thus is more appealing. At the same time, although shaped in the locality, this set of narratives is attractive at the national scale precisely because it becomes intertwined with existing concerns and discontent, such as those conveyed by the movie he arrival of Wang. As a result, an Issue Narrative/National Narrative prevails that depicts the most important Italian industry-the fashion industry-as being outmanoeuvred by the Chinese. Narratives Travelling from the Local to the Global 403 Thus, local narratives, developed in a city and industrial district shattered by the crisis of the local textile industry, became an internally coherent, articulated narrative able to travel unobstructed to other geographic scales and defy even the matter-of-fact consideration that the vast majority of the Chinese entrepreneurs are part and parcel of the Italian fashion industry. I discuss this below. 8. What Is Hidden by the Dominant Narrative Another crucial but less evident reason why the set of narratives shaped in Prato was able to travel to the national scale pertains to the nexus between new forms of labour exploitation, the sound success of fast fashion strategies, and the actors in the fashion industry that benefit from new forms of labour. The international media approach to the “Dickensian working conditions” in Chinese workshops fails to adequately assess the role of the Chinese immigrants’ contracting businesses in the restructuring of the Italian fashion industry. As discussed above, in past decades profound changes in the architecture of global fashion have threatened Italy’s dominant position in the international fashion business. Thanks to their ability to exploit a relatively dispossessed workforce made up of co- nationals, Chinese contracting businesses have been able to drastically bring down production costs while speeding up lead times. A_ production regime has prevailed in the network of Chinese contractors in the fashion industry that owes its competitive edge to the “mobile regime” (Ceccagno 2015). This is a radical reconfiguration of the space at both the inter- and intra-firm levels whereby 1) workers work and live in the workshop; 2) at the same time, they temporarily move from one contracting firm to another to complete urgent orders; 3) they also move through the national territory and beyond in search of better working conditions and opportunities. It is the Chinese contracting businesses’ mobile regime that enables all the actors along the value chain to keep up with the increasingly stringent requirements of the fast fashion industry (Ceccagno 2015, 2016). The working conditions prevailing in Chinese-run workshops are therefore the result of an organization of production geared towards the generation of profit in the Italian fashion industry as a whole, in a global context of fierce competition. This working regime stemmed from the global needs of the fast fashion industry and has prospered thanks to the degree to which new ways of extracting profit from labour have been tolerated, promoted, or tackled in the Italian fashion districts. More precisely, among those directly benefiting from such organizations of