Migration and the Media by Gaoheng Zhang traces a demarcation in the field of Chinese migration studies, focusing on the media coverage dedicated to Chinese migrants in Italy between 1992 and 2012. The main purpose of the book is not only to highlight the cultural and dialogical debate that this media coverage generated in both Italian and Italian-Chinese migrant media. It also provides a useful tool for scholars to better understand the cultural dynamics implied in media communication in Italy (both from the Italian and the Chinese migrants’ points of view) and for the nonscholar public to broaden their comprehension of the complexity of the Chinese presence in Italy and, in a broader sense, in a global perspective.
Choosing to concentrate on four case studies, Zhang argues that the cultural debate that animated media communication on the Chinese community in Italy during this period served two main purposes: migrant integration and economic globalization. In debating Chinese migration, in fact, media in Italy actually gave voice to Italian society's elaboration of two issues: the arrival of immigrants, which changed the idea of Italy from a “departure” country to the destination country of a new population, and the unfeasibility of being bound to the idea of a local economy that has been swept away by globalization.
In this study, Zhang draws on the trends, perspectives, and interpretative tools of various academic disciplines (media studies, migration and ethnic studies, transnational studies, etc.) and chooses a dialogical analysis and methodology to address the subject. He does not just analyze Italian or Italian-Chinese cultural and media production on Chinese migrants in Italy, but strives to put these “voices” in dialogue, giving life to a polyphonic background that generates an original Italian-Chinese cultural framework.
The book is based on a solid corpus of data and materials. It is divided into an introduction and seven chapters plus a conclusion and a coda. The data presented here come from a variety of sources: Zhang selected and consulted more than three hundred media texts, including newspapers, online news and websites, visual materials of various kinds, television shows, and so on. For each case study, Zhang dialogically analyzes different narratives within both the Italian media coverage (e.g., comparing left- and right-leaning newspapers and journalists) and the Italy-based Chinese media (often bilingual periodicals).
Chapter 1 briefly sums up the sociohistorical background of Chinese migration to Italy, highlighting its peculiarities, especially when confronted with Chinese migration elsewhere. It is interesting to note, as Zhang underlines, that unlike Chinese migration to other parts of Europe or the United States, Chinese migration to Italy originated for the most part from the same area (Wenzhou and other neighboring counties in Zhejiang Province). This gave the Italian-Chinese community a uniqueness that can be seen in Chinese media production in Italy, where “the Chinese-language newspapers” analyzed in the book “originate from a shared cultural tradition” (p. 19).
In the same chapter, Zhang discusses why Chinese migrants became an “effective example” in Italy-based media to generally challenge migrant integration and economic globalization in the country and theorizes the existence of an “Italian-Chinese migrant repertoire” (p. 14). This “media game,” which saw pro- and anti-Chinese Italians as well as Chinese media in Italy using transnationalism and ethnocultural essentialism as their main two discursive strategies to fight or support a position or another, is explained in the following chapters through the case studies brought under the lens.
Chapter 2 brings to light how the “Chinese mafia” metaphor dramatically emerged—mainly under the influence of American journalism—in Italian media narratives in the 1990s, exploring how and why this “dominant interpretive lens” of Chinese migration to Italy evolved between 1992 (the year Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were killed by the Mafia) and 2006 (when the publication of the nonfiction book Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano again raised the Chinese mafia issue).
Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the so-called Chinatown Riot in Milan in 2007 in Italian debates and migrant debates. Chapters 5 and 6 compare the local and global debates on “Made in Italy,” which originated with Italian police raids on Chinese-run factories in Prato, a Tuscan city where Chinese entrepreneurship had great success in integrating and taking over the local manufacturing tradition beginning in the 1990s. These events drowned the attention of other international actors, especially the United States, Germany, and Japan, since the “Made in Italy” versus “Made in China” issue again posed the question of localism versus globalization on a larger scale. Chapter 7 investigates media coverage of the Chinese organized march held in Rome in 2012 after the murder of two Chinese migrants. Italian and Chinese counterparts both emphatically chose victimhood narratives to reinforce a positive image of Chinese migrants in Italy.
Zhang's careful analysis, aided by his linguistic skills, which gave him access to sources in three languages, together with his interdisciplinary approach, leads to a “journey” in the Italian-Chinese migrant repertoire theorized by Zhang that is fascinating and intriguing. The book provides “the first substantial media and cultural study of Chinese migration to Italy” (p. 13), demonstrating that this recent migration has a “significant cultural history” (p. 201).
