[rad-green] The Chinese Roots of Italy’s Far-Ri ght Rage

*https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/business/italy-china-far-right.html
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/business/italy-china-far-right.html>New
York Times          Dec. 5, 2019*

*The Chinese Roots of Italy’s Far-Right Rage*

*The country’s new politics are often attributed to anger over migrants.
But the story begins decades ago, when China first targeted small textile
towns.*

*By Peter S. Goodman and Emma Bubola*

[image: image.png]
*Marini, a textile company in Prato, Italy, is one of the few that has
survived Chinese competition.Credit...Gianni Cipriano for The New York
Times*

PRATO, Italy — Like everyone in her family and most of the people in the
factories where she labored in this town nurtured by the textile trade,
Roberta Travaglini counted herself an unwavering supporter of the political
left.

During her childhood, her father brought her to boisterous Communist Party
rallies full of music, dancing and fiery speeches championing workers. When
she turned 18, she took a job at a textile mill and voted for the party
herself.

But that was before everything changed — before China emerged as a textile
powerhouse, undercutting local businesses; before she and her co-workers
lost their jobs; before she found herself, a mother of two grown boys,
living off her retired parents; before Chinese immigrants arrived in Prato,
leasing shuttered textile mills and stitching up clothing during all hours
of the night.

In last year’s national elections, Ms. Travaglini, 61, cast her vote for
the League, an extreme right-wing party whose bombastic leader, Matteo
Salvini, offered a rudimentary solution to Italy’s travails: Close the
gates.

Denigrating Islam, and warning of an “invasion” that threatened Italians
with “ethnic cleansing,” he vowed to bar boats bringing migrants from North
Africa. He presented himself as an unapologetic nationalist who would
rescue the dispossessed from what had become of the Italian left, long
since metamorphosed into a distant elite.

To Ms. Travaglini’s ear, Mr. Salvini was speaking to people like her, and
offering a coherent explanation for what had happened to their lives:
Shadowy global forces and morally reprobate immigrants had stolen their
Italian birthright — the promise of a comfortable life. Artisans and
hardworking laborers had rescued Italy from the wreckage of World War II,
constructing a prosperous nation, before wicked elements plundered the
bounty.

“We are in the hands of the world elites that want to keep us poorer and
poorer,” Ms. Travaglini says. “When I was young, it was the Communist Party
that was protecting the workers, that was protecting our social class. Now,
it’s the League that is protecting the people.”

The rise of the League — now exiled from the government, yet poised to lead
whenever national elections are next held — is typically explained by
public rage over immigration. This is clearly a major factor. But the
foundations of the shift were laid decades ago, as textile towns like Prato
found themselves upended by global economic forces, and especially by
competition from a rapidly evolving China.

It is a story with parallels to the American industrial Midwest. As China
rapidly ascended as an export power, joblessness and despair grew in the
manufacturing heartland of the United States. Anger over decades of trade
liberalization played a key role in putting Donald J. Trump in the White
House.

Italy has proved especially vulnerable to competition from China, given
that many of its artisanal trades — textiles, leather, shoemaking — have
long been dominated by small, family-run operations lacking the scale to
compete with factories in a nation of 1.4 billion people. Four Italian
regions — Tuscany, Umbria, Marche and Emilia-Romagna — that were as late as
the 1980s electing Communists, and then reliably supporting center-left
candidates, have in recent years swung sharply toward the extreme right.

Many working-class people say that delineation is backward: The left had
already abandoned them.

“So many Italian families are struggling,” says Federica Castricini, a
40-year-old mother of two who works at a shoemaker in Marche, and who has
dumped the left for the League. “The left doesn’t even see the problems of
Italian families right now.”

Despite its Marxist trappings and solidarity with the Soviet Union, the
Italian Communist Party was never devoted to the revolutionary overthrow of
capitalism. It was left wing in the same way as Nordic countries like
Sweden, its leaders intent on equitably distributing the gains of economic
growth.

“The left has always been able to govern during expansionary moments,
during the construction of the economy after World War II,” says Nadia
Urbinati, an Italian political theorist at Columbia University in New York.
“They could govern by promising good salaries, a pension system and health
care. When there was an expansive economy, the left was strong, because the
left offers you jobs.

“But when there are no jobs,” Ms. Urbinati continues, “the left doesn’t
have an alternative to the capitalist system. The right has an effective
emotional short-term response, showing that it has the ability to use the
state apparatus to impose law and order.”

Italy’s official unemployment rate has exceeded 10 percent for most of the
last decade. High public debt combined with European rules limiting
deficits have prevented the government from spending to promote growth.
Banks choked with bad loans have held back lending. The population is
aging, tax evasion is rampant, the economy is stagnant, and talented young
people are leaving.

People in cities like Prato, next to Florence in the heart of Tuscany, have
come to see the left as a tribe of effete technocrats, prescribing
globalization as the solution to every problem.

“In the past, all the left-wing governments were saying there are no simple
answers to complex problems,” says Riccardo Cammelli, an author of books
about history and politics in Prato. “What Salvini is saying now is that
there are simple answers to complex problems.”

*The China shock*

By the time World War II ended, Civitanova Marche was shattered. The town
alongside the Adriatic Sea had attracted relentless allied bombing aimed at
taking out bridges.

“The city was on its knees,” recalls Cesare Catini, 81. The oldest of three
boys, Mr. Catini had to work to help support his family. At 12, he left
school and started making shoes with his uncle, beginning a career that
would trace the arc of Italy’s national progression.

In 1961, when Mr. Catini was only 22, he started his own business, making
women’s shoes in his garage. His two younger brothers joined him. They
bought leather from tanneries in Naples and Milan and made 50 pairs of
shoes a day, selling their stock at street markets.

They invested their profits into adding machinery and workers. By the
1980s, they had hired a designer from Milan, and their factory employed 70
people, selling its shoes in the United States and West Germany. His two
children completed high school. He and his wife, who handled the factory’s
books, bought a brick house on a hilltop looking out on the glittering sea.

But by the 1990s, danger was brewing. At trade fairs in Milan and Bologna,
where he displayed his wares to foreign buyers, Mr. Catini noticed visitors
from China taking photos of his designs. “Why are they coming to fairs and
not buying anything?” he wondered.

The following decade revealed the answer. German customers were canceling
orders, suddenly able to buy increasingly high-quality shoes at cut-rate
prices from Chinese suppliers.

In 2001, China secured entry to the World Trade Organization, gaining easy
access to markets around the globe. In subsequent years, exports by Italian
footwear manufacturers plummeted by more than 40 percent.

In a desperate bid to survive, Mr. Catini reluctantly struck a deal to make
shoes for a trendy Italian fashion brand. He borrowed about 300,000 euros
($331,000) and used the money to establish a factory in Romania to make the
uppers for the new shoes at a fraction of his costs in Italy.

Soon, the Italian brand pressed him to lower his prices, asserting that it
could buy the same shoes for half the cost in China. But the reduced price
would not have covered his expenses.

One morning in early 2008, Mr. Catini gathered his employees on the factory
floor. He had known many of them for decades. He had attended their
weddings, their children’s christenings, funerals for their relatives. He
had advanced them pay to allow them to buy homes. Now, he told them that
they were all losing their jobs.

“I dream of this every night,” he says, his ruddy cheeks contorting in
pain. “The workers were part of the family, from the first to the last.” He
crushes his brown twill cap in his hands, prompting his wife to reach over
and gently take it away.

In the nearby hilltop town of Montegranaro, some 600 footwear companies
have dwindled to about 150, prompting locals to embrace the League and its
harsh words about immigrants.

“When people do not feel secure economically, they cannot stand the fact
that guarantees are given to people who come from abroad,” says Mauro
Lucentini, a League member who holds a seat on Montegranaro’s council.

His burly frame is clad in a blue sweater embroidered with an American
flag. “Because I love America!” he says. “I love Trump!” He waves a blue
and white scarf with the letters “Italians First,” along with the logo for
the League — a warrior wielding a sword and shield.

Mr. Lucentini makes his living as a real estate agent. Over the past
decade, housing prices have dropped by half, he says. Between 1996 and
2008, he sold about 100 apartments a year, he says. This year, he has sold
10.

As he wanders the village on a recent morning, navigating streets looking
out on autumn-tinged pastures dotted with cypress trees, Mr. Lucentini
indicates the landmarks of decline. His mother’s furniture store has been
devastated by Ikea, which draws heavily on low-cost suppliers in Asia.
Sheets of cardboard cover the glass doors of a failed retailer that sold
shoelaces and other footwear accessories. A shop that sold tools and
machinery is empty. A three-story factory that once employed 120 people
sits abandoned, its paint peeling.

Mr. Lucentini greets an elderly woman, kissing her on both cheeks. The
perfume shop she has operated for more than half a century is barely
hanging on. He tickles the face of a newborn baby in a stroller.

“That’s very unusual,” he says later. “This is not a place where people are
inclined to have children.”

The town’s population has dropped from about 14,000 two decades ago to
13,000, with about 1,000 new immigrants — Albanians, Africans and Chinese.
He uses racist language to describe the recent arrivals, claiming that
dark-skinned foreigners have degraded his community.

“When immigration was at its peak, there were many cases of violence,” he
says. “Especially the Nigerians, who are very wild, very savage.”

This sort of talk has become increasingly common. Five years ago, in
elections for the European Parliament, the League captured only 3 percent
of the vote in Marche. This year, it garnered 38 percent. The center-left
Democratic Party saw its support plunge from 45 percent to 22 percent.

The reasons for his community’s troubles are many, Mr. Lucentini concedes.
The global financial crisis of 2008 was especially brutal in Italy.
Existential worries about the euro currency lifted borrowing rates,
tightening credit. Russians used to arrive in town with wads of cash to buy
shoes, but American and European sanctions have stopped that.

Still, he maintains, the League is correct to focus on halting immigration
as a solution to economic troubles, along with lowering taxes. Many
migrants are not really fleeing war and poverty, he contends, contradicting
reality, yet in a way widely shared by League supporters.

“We can’t help the last person in Africa and not help our neighbor,” he
says.

*‘Nobody was afraid of the future’*

As long ago as the 12th century, people were making fabric in Prato,
exploiting the availability of water via canals erected by the Romans.

The modern boom came after World War II, as people poured into the city to
work in the mills. By the 1980s, Italy’s premier fashion houses were
sending designers to Prato, as local producers yielded material for Armani,
Versace, and Dolce & Gabbana. Textile operations stayed small and
specialized, using workshops tucked into homes, enabling them to pivot
quickly to satisfy changing fashion tastes. Local entrepreneurs watched
runway models wearing their creations on catwalks in Paris and Milan and
felt indomitable.

“We thought we were the best in the world,” says Edoardo Nesi, who spent
his days running the textile factory started by his grandfather, and his
nights penning novels. “Everybody was making money.”

The Communist Party controlled the town, using their power to deliver
public works — a contemporary art museum, a library inside an abandoned
mill, a textile museum.

Mr. Nesi’s father was a lover of Beethoven, literature and timely payment.
He bestowed to his son a lucrative arrangement: He sent wool to overcoat
manufacturers in West Germany, and they unfailingly sent back money 10 days
later. His father assured him that this was a formula for enduring success.
Be honest, produce quality fabric, “and you will be as happy as I am.”

“We lived in a place where everything had been good for 40 years,” Mr. Nesi
says. “Nobody was afraid of the future.”

In retrospect, they should have been. By the 1990s, the Germans were
purchasing cheaper fabrics woven in Bulgaria and Romania. Then, they
shifted their sights to China. The German customers felt pressure to find
savings because enormous new retailers were carving into their businesses —
brands like Zara and H&M, tapping low-wage factories in Asia.

Chinese factories were buying the same German-made machinery used by the
mills in Prato. They were hiring Italian consultants who were instructing
them on the modern arts of the trade.

Some companies adapted by elevating their quality. One local mill, Marini,
followed the American clothing brands that were its customers as they
gravitated to China, shipping its fabric there. But this was clearly the
exception. From 2001 to 2011, Prato’s 6,000 textile companies became 3,000,
as those employed in the industry dropped to 19,000 from 40,000, according
to Confindustria, an Italian trade association.

Mr. Nesi tried making clothes for Zara, which constantly demanded lower
prices. “You started to work on how to pervert your own quality in order to
sell it to Zara,” he says. “They wanted the best look. It had to be
something that looks like your quality without actually being it. That’s
more or less a description of what they wanted our life to become.
Something that looks like your life but is of lesser quality.”

Eventually, he sold the business to spare his father from “an old age full
of shame.”

As Prato’s factories went dark, people began arriving from China to exploit
an opportunity.

Most were from Wenzhou, a coastal city famed for its entrepreneurial
spirit. They took over failed workshops and built new factories. They
imported fabric from China, sewing it into clothing. They cannily imitated
the styles of Italian fashion brands, while affixing a valuable label to
their creations — “Made in Italy.”

Today, more than a tenth of the city’s 200,000 inhabitants are Chinese
immigrants here legally, plus, by varying estimates, perhaps 15,000 who
lack proper documents.

Chinese groceries and restaurants have emerged to serve the local
population. On the outskirts of the city, Chinese-owned warehouses overflow
with racks of clothing destined for street markets in Florence and Paris.

Among Italian textile workers who have veered to the right, the arrival of
the Chinese tends to get lumped together with African migration as an
indignity that has turned Prato into a city they no longer recognize.

“I don’t think it’s fair that they come to take jobs away from Italians,”
says Ms. Travaglini, the laid-off textile worker. She claims that Chinese
companies don’t pay taxes and violate wage laws, reducing pay for everyone.

Since losing her job at a textile factory nearly three years ago, Ms.
Travaglini has survived by fixing clothes for people in her neighborhood.
“There are no jobs, not even for young people,” she says.

Chinese-owned factories have jobs, she acknowledges, but she will not
apply. “That’s all Chinese people,” she says, with evident distaste. “I
don’t feel at ease.”

The concept of multiculturalism is anathema to her. She insists that Italy
is for Italians — a term that can never be extended to Chinese people, not
even to Italian-born, Italian-educated, Italian-speaking Chinese people.

“They are Italianized,” she says, “but they are still not Italian.”

Within the Chinese community, people protest that their contributions to
the local economy are typically dismissed in a haze of racist accusations.

“These warehouses were empty before Chinese people came,” says Marco Weng,
20, whose parents arrived from China three decades ago. “Chinese people
didn’t take jobs. We have created jobs.” He is about to open a chain of
Korean fried chicken restaurants with a partner.

Marco Hong, 23, a second-generation Chinese Italian, oversees production at
the clothing company started by his parents. Operating under the Distretto
12 brand, the company buys fabric from Prato mills, sewing sleek, modern
clothes that land on shelves in Spain and Germany. Some 35 people work at
the factory, roughly half of them Italians.

“People who know the sector know that work has increased since the Chinese
arrived,” he says.

What Ms. Travaglini knows is downward mobility. She buys groceries with
cash from her parents. Her younger son is about to move to Dubai to look
for work, seeing no future in Prato.

Her older son used to consider himself a Communist, worshiping Che Guevara
and Fidel Castro. Now, he is active with the League.

She can no longer afford to shop at the clothing boutiques in the medieval
city center. On a recent afternoon, she goes to a Chinese-run outlet and
surveys the inventory, much of it made in Prato by Chinese companies — fake
fur winter coats, leather jackets, lacy bras.

“They are pretty things,” she says, “and they are not too expensive.”

*Peter S. Goodman is a London-based European economics correspondent. He
was previously a national economic correspondent in New York. He has also
worked at The Washington Post as a China correspondent, and was global
editor in chief of the International Business Times. @petersgoodman*

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