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The vast majority of Chinese migrants in Italy hail from the southern part of 浙江Zhèjiāng Province. Zhejianese migrants were the first to reach Italy via France since the 1920s; in the 1980s they made up more than 90 percent of all Chinese migrants in Italy, and at least 80 percent of the total in the 2000s. It is estimated that in the 2010s they still make up between 70 and 80 percent of the Chinese population in the country. Chinese from 福建Fújiàn province – mainly originating from三明 Sānmíng and 福州Fúzhōu (counties of 福清Fúqīng and 長了 Chánglè) - started arriving in Italy in the early 1990s and they now amount to 10 to 15 percent of the total. Italy, England, and Hungary are the countries in Europe where most Fujianese have settled.

This paper presents some central word-formation strategies in Chinese by mainly focusing on compound words and word-formation patterns emerging as a result of the central role played by compounding in Chinese. In fact, while in some languages compounding is a peripheral word-formation strategy, in Chinese it is the most productive means of word-formation. This emerges clearly from the corpus of neologisms developed over the last thirty years included in The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (CCD) (2002) where out of 709 new words (those with no more than two syllables) almost 95 percent (672) are compounds, while only a little more than two percent (16) are derived words.The formation of compound words in Chinese has been discussed recently by Huang (1998), Packard (2000), Ceccagno and Scalise (2006, 2007), Ceccagno (2007), Ceccagno and Basciano (2007, 2009a, 2009b). The word-formation processes in Chinese discussed in this paper are (1) metacompounding, or compound words whose constituents are truncated forms of underlying compounds; (2) neologisms coined from previous constituents of metacompounds; (3) re-analysis of syllables from polysyllabic words, loanwords, calques and hybrids as morphemes, and the resulting new morphemes; (4) monosyllabic neologisms coined as loanwords; (5) neologisms formed through the re-analysis of the semantics of the constituents of existing compound words, and (6) neologisms coined on the internet that intentionally aim at breaking the prevailing word-formation strategies.

Due to the growing importance of people-to-people diplomacy in China’s global strategies, this is a momentous time for China’s international development volunteering. Drawing from underexploited Chinese sources, the paper shows that international volunteering has the potential for enhancing China’s public appeal globally and giving a ‘softer’ connotation to China’s aid to Africa. In this paper the policy, practices, and discourses about China’s voluntary service are examined and framed within the context of China’s soft power strategies. Moreover, the recent domestic debate on shortcomings of the ‘China Foreign Aid Youth Volunteers Program’ in Africa and the new directions suggested to the country’s leadership by influential Chinese academics are critically analysed. The focus is on the tailoring of a new political and ideological ‘space’ for the Chinese NGOs as implementers of future international volunteering programs. In spite of considerable debates and evolutions, Chinese international volunteering programs seems to remain under tight state control and to be best understood as social engineering efforts, with China’s soft power as their main objective.

Buzzwords are fashionable words or phrases. Often, as technical words or phrases, buzzwords are coined and used by an inside community. However, when used in larger contexts they may have implications for the larger community of outsiders, even when the outsiders cannot fully grasp the precise meaning of the word. In the framework of the ongoing debate on the interactions between vocabulary and social practices, this paper undertakes to analyze Chinese neologisms in their twofold role of mirroring new trends in society and contributing to the conceptualization of the social reality. Neoliberal practices and state rhetoric together with values emerging from the civil society all concur, often in contradictory ways, to the coining of neologisms that, in turn, contribute to orient today’s Chinese dominant discourses and practices.

This encyclopaedia presents a systematic overview of the existing scholarship regarding migration within and into Europe. The first section contains survey studies of the various regions and countries in Europe covering the last centuries. The second section presents information on about 220 individual groups of migrants from the Sephardic Jews emigration from Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the present-day migration of old-age pensioners to the holiday villages in the sun. The first resource of its kind, The Encyclopaedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe is a comprehensive and authoritative research tool. A unique resource for scholars and researchers - there are no other publications with a comparable scope Argues that migration has been an integral part of the history of Europe, providing detailed analysis of immigration in a wide variety of European countries Reveals the variety of patterns of integration exhibited by various groups after migration

Chinese migration is now global in scale and is reaching an increasing range of destination countries. It is a complex and diverse process. This book is the first serious research in Europe that examines both the human trafficking and smuggling that occur alongside the Chinese migration. The research shows the increase and diversification of Chinese irregular migration and the existence of an 'ethnic business' that has become an integral part of the national economy in destination countries. In chapter three we explore legal and illegal aspects of Chinese irregular migration in Italy with detailed reference to individual case studies, academic writing, official statistics and data, interviews with police and labour inspectors, the findings of police investigations and court proceedings. The methodology used in explained in great detail. Using a combination of data, we show the implications of national immigration policies. Some of of the policies adopted in the monitoring of migration flows are having the unintended effect of worsening the situation fo migrant workers: criminal networks have emerged, managed predominantly by Italians, which specialize in providing illegal services and false papers for regularization.

While in some languages compounding can be considered peripheral, in Chinese compounding is the most productive means of word formation. It has been shown that approximately 80% of Chinese words are compound words (Xing, 2006). In the corpus of neologisms proposed in The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (2002) more than 90% of all new words are compounds . Therefore analyzing Chinese compounds means analyzing the most significant morphological phenomenon of that language. Over time different theoretical approaches have been adopted in the analysis of Chinese compounds. In this article, starting from the classification of compounds argued for by Bisetto and Scalise (2005), we put forth a more detailed description of macro-types in order to be able to undertake an in-depth analysis of Chinese compounding. One much debated theoretical issue is the morphological head position in the languages of the world. This article discusses the headedness in Chinese compounds and proposes a new Head Position Principle for Chinese compounds, which challenges some widespread assumptions and could well be of interest for the analysis of headedness in other languages. In the attempt to identify head in Chinese compounds, we have identified a phenomenon never analyzed before, i.e. the formation of new compounds from underlying compounds, that we name ‘metacompounding’.

This article discusses the different analyses of Chinese compounds put forth in recent years and presents both the new classification for Chinese compounding and the headedness principle proposed by Ceccagno & Basciano (2007). Abbreviation in Chinese is the result of the interface of two opposing tendencies in Chinese: recursion and condensation. The resulting new words are often disyllabic compounds. For many compounds formed through abbreviation the analysis of the surface forms is somehow problematic, since at least one of the constituents is a truncated form of an underlying compound. Therefore, Ceccagno & Basciano (2007, 2009a, 2009b) propose to consider the features of the underlying compounds. This process of analysis is called ‘metacompounding’ and the compounds analyzed in this way are called ‘metacompounds’. The main focus of this article is precisely metacompounding, which proves to be an effective tool to analyzing these compounds because it prevents a misinterpretation of the meaning, the lexical category, and/or the position of the head of the surface compound.

This chapter presents an overview of Chinese migrants’ businesses in Italy, showing the constant growth of individually-owned businesses and the dramatic increase in commercial activities. This chapter describes how Chinese subcontracting workshops are operated and how for a long span of time they have enabled Italian final firms to remain competitive, notwithstanding the stiff competition from countries with low labor costs. It also describes a major change taking place within the ethnic workshops where by now different occupations within the ethnic niche tend to coincide with different regional origins of Chinese migrants. Chinese manufacturing businesses are concentrated mainly in the Italian industrial districts. The place in Italy with the highest concentration of Chinese is Prato, a mid-sized city in Tuscany, well known in the literature on industrial districts worldwide. In Prato, Chinese migrants previously active mainly as suppliers in recent years have been upscaling in large numbers and becoming final firms in the pronto moda (ready fashion) business, occupying the entire low and medium-to-low garment production. This move, started some years ago, is now realizing its full potential. This chapter uses interviews conducted in 2006 in Prato as well as a wealth of information collected during the last five years at the Prato municipality among social workers, lawyers and language and cultural facilitators active in providing services to migrants. It, for the first time, undertakes an in-depth description of the internal organization of Chinese-operated pronto modas and of their relationships with Italian suppliers and co-ethnic contractors in the context of a global fashion business. Finally this chapter argues that Chinese migrants’ production organization has followed a pattern strikingly similar to the one existing in Italian industrial districts at the times of their economic success (among the vast literature on industrial districts see Becattini, 2000, Dei Ottati, 2003), exacerbated by the new Chinese ideology of the successful migrant and by constraints of local contexts striving for survival in a globalized economy. While a systematic comparison of models of organization in the traditional Italian industrial districts over the years of greatest expansion, and the characteristics of Chinese migrant settlements in those districts over recent years, still waits to be outlined, this chapter provides a preliminary analysis of the main points of contact and macro-level differences.

Compounds have received much attention in recent years; several proposals for classification have been put forth in the international literature. This article, developed within the Morbo/comp project on compounds, aims at contributing to a widening of the debate on the classification of Chinese compounds and their internal structure initiated by Ceccagno and Scalise (2006). To this end, we briefly introduce the existing classifications put forth by different scholars for compounds and in particular we will focus on the approaches proposed for Chinese compounding. We then discuss how to apply to Chinese the classification for compounds argued for by Bisetto and Scalise (2005). After highlighting some shortcomings of this classification with respect to Chinese compounds, we propose a refinement of it through a new definition of the three macro-types proposed by the two authors. We present a new table of Chinese compounds based on an analysis of a corpus of neologisms.

In this chapter I argue that over time the Chinese productive activities in Italy have significantly contributed to maintaining the competitiveness of some of the sectors in which Made in Italy products are famous such as garments, leather goods, couches and shoes (this article specifically addresses the garment industry); and in some instances they have even contributed to the expansion of the sector and the area where they operate. Even more significantly, in recent years, a growing number of Chinese migrants have been able to blend strategies of migration and transnational capital accumulation taking advantage of China’s growing role in the global economy. Chinese importers’ businesses, which in the last few years heavily have contributed to redefine the modalities of the Chinese presence in Italy, is due to China’s central role in the globalization of markets, and to its growing capacity to produce goods of diverse quality at competitive prices for the European markets. In the first years of the new century, the businesses of Chinese importers were on the verge of making Italy one of the principal European wholesale centres, second only to Budapest, for manufactured Chinese goods for the European market. In this article I will present the major economic changes that have taken place during the last decades for the Chinese migrants in Italy and argue that a very new situation has emerged as the result of economic expansion and market development in the People’s Republic of China and its participation to the globalized economy. The impact of China’s new international role is modifying expectations, opportunities, employment patterns and self-perception among the Chinese migrants, and is enhancing the already strong propensity of these migrants towards high mobility along Europe and between China and Europe. I intend to offer Italy as a case study of how global capitalism and globalization is changing migration from being economic settlement in the ethnic niche of garment/leather with modest possibilities of expansion, to full manufacturing and new employment patterns as importers and wholesalers of goods made in China. Recently, however, both production and commercial activities managed by Chinese migrants in Italy have been affected by an acute crisis as a result of a number of factors. For the Chinese involved in productive activities, the crisis can be framed within the broader crisis of the manufacturing sector in Italy, and possibly due to competition wrought by imported Chinese goods; while the crisis weighing on Chinese wholesale and retail importers has principally been caused by the Italian government’s intent to contain those imports from China that are perceived to be in direct competition with Made in Italy products produced in Italy. Contrary to expectations that these new occupations and new businesses activated by the Chinese in Italy are well accepted as they produce entrepreneurial opportunities for migrants and indirectly also for the receiving country, Italy pursue to regulate and to limit these economic developments because she perceive them as a threat to national manufacturing and export. In this article, again, I argue that Italy can be seen as a case study since in this country a new way of trying to control migration through economic sanctions can be seen at work. In this respect Italy could be seen as the outpost, the place where policies are implemented of reaction to China’s economic expansion and market development which affects migrants and local population alike. What is now happening in Italy could in the future be a controversial issue high in the European agenda.

This article examines the linguistic representation of female and male gender in standard Chinese. It analyzes pronouns and person reference nouns in Chinese from a gender perspective, describing the main tendencies of Chinese in the use of genuinely indefinite nouns and covert or false generics. Covert or false generics are expressions that have an inherent gender bias, even though they are neutral structurally . Moreover, this article also undertakes a preliminary analysis of the linguistic representation of genders in a modern writing environment, that is using personal computers with standard (commercial) word processing software. Constant reference is made to this writing situation and to its peculiarities throughout this article. In fact, the visual aspect of Chinese characters (or logographs) and the shift from Chinese standard phonetic transcription (pīnyīn) to characters while writing a text in Chinese entails a totally different and novel approach to word-processing: the software makes suggestions and choices at the word processing level which are not necessary for alphabetic scripts. This article therefore highlights the role of widely used word processing input methods in contributing to perpetuate or even strengthen gender-biased uses of the (written) language.

The vast majority of Chinese migrants settled in Italy have pursued the dream of quick economic success without being able to translate it into reality. These migrants have remained ensnared in dependent work – be it within the ethnic economy or with Italian employers – and have been unable to emulate the pioneers that had succeeded in seizing the opportunities offered by a market open to immigrant subcontracting and by the growing availability of compatriot labor. Those seriously excluded from independent work are prevalently the migrants who arrived in the second half of the nineties, when the opportunities for quick success seized by the first migrants were drastically decreasing. It is thanks to the scores of migrants who have not been able to pull themselves above dependent work that the business of the ethnic economy – and, consequently, part of that of Italian firms who contract single manufacturing tasks to the Chinese – has been able to expand for so long. Caught in the middle we find the small entrepreneurs, those who have been able to fulfill their entrepreneurial dream but who have remained vulnerable and as such have been penalized by a context in which they represented the weakest part of the productive chain. Today, these small entrepreneurs find themselves in the grip of the crisis. At the opposite end, we find instead those Chinese who have reached economic success and who have managed to make it into the restricted group that today constitutes the Chinese elite in Italy. To this elite belong the Chinese who have risen above the intensive and precarious workshop business and who now manage the entire production process. However, for them too the future is full of unknowns and the position that they have gained is now threatened by the increasing presence on Italian markets of products imported from China. At the top of this increasingly stratified community we find the migrant importers and especially those who have been able to exercise their business activities for a few years prior to the Italian government’s reaction to the growing presence of Chinese products in its internal market. These are special migrants, quite removed from the stereotype of the migrant that has prevailed so far in Italy. They embody to the highest level the new model of Chinese migrant and are perceived as transnational individuals (or groups) who derive a role of their own – as well as their own interests and identities – from the new flow of persons, merchandise, and information engendered by globalization. The destiny of the Chinese migrant-importers, entrepreneurs, and contractors in our country – like the destiny of the Italian textile industry – is linked to the evolution of national and international industrial policies and of the regimes of exchange that will prevail in the next few months and years. In 2005, due to the approval of the Multifibre agreement, the quotas that have influenced the global commerce in textiles and clothing will lapse. At the time of this article’s printing, the fear that China’s new situation will monopolize the market is growing in many countries. Peking does try to reassure the world by explaining that it aims to shift its production from current practices, which are prevalently labor-intensive, to ones that are capital, technological, and research intensive . It is exactly this route which, within a short period of time, could make the competition between the Italian and Chinese fashion industry more direct.

The article introduces the different groups of Chinese migrants in Italy according to the areas of origin in China, and presents some of the major changes that have taken place in the past few years within the ethnic Chinese economy in Italy and in particular in Prato, an industrial district in central Italy with a high concentration of Chinese small productive activities.

Sulla riproduzione sociale e la cura globale esiste una ricca letteratura. L’approccio adottato in questo articolo si pone in continuita con quegli studi che mirano ad ampliare gli ambiti di indagine in modo da far emergere la ricca diversi-ta che caratterizza chi offre le cure e chi ne beneficia, e le dinamiche che li legano. Sulla base di dati empirici, in questo articolo viene discusso il caso della delocalizzazione della cura tra i migranti cinesi nell’industria della moda italiana inteso come contributo ‘locale’ alla concettualizzazione sulla cura a livello globale (Ra-ghuram, 2012). L’articolo mostra come la linea di confine che separa chi offre le cure da chi le riceve - spesso invocata nelle analisi sulle catene di cura globali - sia nei fatti estremamente incerta sotto molti aspetti. Infatti, nel caso in questione non puo essere operata una chiara distinzione tra paesi ricchi e paesi poveri, dal mo-mento che chi offre le cure e chi le riceve proviene dallo stesso paese. Inoltre, an-che la linea che separa i diversi attori in termini di reddito e di posizione sociale e fragile. In un certo senso, quindi, il caso della delocalizzazione della cura dei figli tra i migranti cinesi complica il concetto di pregnanza della classe nelle catene di cura globali. I figli dei migranti cinesi, inoltre, in molti casi, non vivono con i propri genitori ma nelle case delle baby-sitter. Si tratta quindi di un caso ben diverso da quelli spesso discussi nella letteratura sulle catene di cura globali dove le donne migranti si prendono cura dei bambini nelle case dei genitori, vivendo con la fami-glia o recandosi al lavoro durante il giorno. Insomma, le pratiche prevalenti tra i migranti cinesi in Italia mostrano un panorama ricco di peculiarita significative che possono arricchire la concettualizzazione sulla cura globale.