Tuesday, March 17, 2020
WHY NORTH ITALY FIRST BIG OUTBREAK OUTSIDE CHINA? HERE'S WHY NOT JUST PRATO
Friday, April 3, 2020
ITALIAN GOVERNOR RACIST SINOPHOBE
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
WHY NORTH ITALY FIRST BIG OUTBREAK OUTSIDE CHINA? HERE'S WHY NOT JUST PRATO
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-chinese-workers-who-assemble-designer-bags-in-tuscany
The Chinese feel like the Jews of the thirties. Prato is a city that had a big economic crisis, and now there’s a nouveau-riche class of Chinese driving fancy cars, spending money in restaurants, and dressing in the latest fashions. It’s a very dangerous situation.
Elizabeth Krause, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has written about the changes in Prato. She told me, “While I was there, people would say to me, ‘Eravamo noi i cinesi’ ”—“We were the Chinese.”
Even as many Italians maintained a suspicion of Chinese immigrants, they still criticized them for not contributing fully to the wider economy. Innocenti, the leather artisan, claimed that “the Chinese don’t even go to the store here. They have a van that goes from factory to factory, selling Band-Aids, tampons, and chicken. And in the back of the van they have a steamer with rice.” The under-the-table cash economy of Prato’s Chinese factories has facilitated tax evasion. Last year, as the result of an investigation by the Italian finance ministry into five billion dollars’ worth of questionable money transfers, the Bank of China, whose Milan branch had reportedly been used for half of them, paid a settlement of more than twenty million dollars. Many of the transfers, the authorities said, represented undeclared income from Chinese-run businesses, or money generated by the counterfeiting of Italian fashion goods.
Wikipedia: Prato, Italy, estimated 45,000 Chinese migrants, including illegals....
Wikipedia: Prato, Italy, estimated 45,000 Chinese migrants, including illegals....
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
PLAYING THREE SIDES ROMP DOWN MEMORY LANE ITALY JAPAN CHINA AND YOU
Let's just talk for a moment about "made In Italy" and look at my recent posts, re large populations of Chinese nationals now living for several decades in Prato, Milan, and elsewhere, making things to be, falsely, marketed globally as made in Italy (by Italians!).
That is no doubt a huge reason Italy had such a huge outbreak of COVID 19.
I used to casually refer to how Japan had been playing three sides, long ago, secret back door China trade, claiming to us that it was all made in Japan. There was an anti communist ban on China trade back then.
That is no doubt a huge reason Italy had such a huge outbreak of COVID 19.
I used to casually refer to how Japan had been playing three sides, long ago, secret back door China trade, claiming to us that it was all made in Japan. There was an anti communist ban on China trade back then.
Some few old Japan hands of course knew the truth back then, but winked at the trade for all reasons.
It is not at all clear, as best I recall, that Nixon even knew about all this, that had long been going on behind our backs before, when China then made its opening, that became, and came to be erroneously credited to Nixon as, the Nixon Shock, as Pillsbury recounts.
One major point is missed in this account, of course. It was not merely that the opening with China was a "shock" to Japan.
It was, at that time, given their long surreptitious trade relations against American policy, a betrayal of Japan by China, which of course could not be openly discussed in those terms at all.
Part of the reason for it was worsening relations between China and Russia at that time, but that did not lessen its implications as a betrayal, even though Japan was not in a position to step in in a big way with military assistance, as the US was, ostensibly quid pro quo. Still, a betrayal of Japan.
Part of the reason for it was worsening relations between China and Russia at that time, but that did not lessen its implications as a betrayal, even though Japan was not in a position to step in in a big way with military assistance, as the US was, ostensibly quid pro quo. Still, a betrayal of Japan.
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