There were only 1,618 Chinese migrants in Italy in the mid 1980s (Ceccagno 2001), with some 500 living in Milan (Cologna and Farina 1997). Since the early 1980s, however, a novel situation had emerged in China of renewed migratory movements after a halt of more than 30 years. As a result of China’s growing integration into the global market economy and into the framework of the larger world migration patterns, international mobility from China soared. Growing numbers of so-called “new Chinese migrants” settled in the Americas, Australasia, and Europe.

Europe became an attractive des…