Compressing Personal Time: Ethnicity and Gender within a Chinese Niche in Italy

Italy is the southern European country with the largest Chinese population. So-called Chinese 'new migrants', who started arriving in Italy from the early 1980s, entered into a niche characterised by contracting businesses. These businesses performed manufacturing tasks for Italiana firms producing garments and leather goods. This article argues that the main opportunity for the Chienese migrants in Italy has not be a vacant industry, but the crisis that the Italian fashion industry has been experiencing during the last years. Chinese migrants have helped in containing the crisis and have also made possible an expansion of the economic sector in some areas. The article also highlights gender issues within the productive process. The competitive advantage held by the Chinese comes from their extreme flexibility, the central element of which is the compression of private life and childcare time. This engenders a particular organization of life and work where traditional gender roles tend to be abolished, at least in the realm of work. The article then compares the situation within the ethnic workshops with the gender division of labor among Italian women and men in the same sector and contrasts this model with the experience of Chinese women in New York in the 1980s described by Zhou (1992) where family obligations prevailed on work pressures.