Q&A: Gaoheng Zhang’s Migration and the Media: Debating Chinese Migration to Italy, 1992-2012 (University of Toronto Press, 2019)
What are the major themes and takeaways in Migration and the Media: Debating Chinese Migration to Italy, 1992-2012?
The main themes of the book are: Chinese migration to Italy since the 1990s and its conveyance to the public via the news media, such as television news, newspapers, and internet forums. I put Chinese migrant journalism into dialogue with various kinds of the Italian media in order to see how debates about the Chinese migration evolved. How did this migration lead to media debates about the merits and drawbacks of immigration to Italy in terms of economic globalization and migrant integration? Why did the media often view Chinese migrants in Italy and mainland Chinese or the Chinese Central Government as one group?
I argue that Chinese migration was a particularly compelling example for the media to speak about these issues. By reformulating Robert M. Entman’s definitions of framing, I view the Italian-migrant and local-global frames as structuring the ways in which journalists chose to depict and debate the Chinese migration settlement in Italy, using these frames to define its problems, diagnose its causes, and pass moral judgments about it. In addition, I draw on sociologist Ann Swidler’s notion of culture as a repertoire to argue that journalists, politicians, entrepreneurs and other stakeholders contributed to an Italian-Chinese migrant repertoire, from which many news articles drew for their coverage of the Chinese migration during 1992-2012.
What were your motivations in taking on this project?
I was motivated to write this book because often social scientists who examine Chinese migration to Italy, as well as activists in Italy who advocate for these migrants’ integration, are frustrated at how the media depicted the migration in an erroneous way, even though these academics and activists repeatedly pointed journalists to the better and more informed sources on the migration. I started to wonder why journalists kept, say, referring to the so-called Chinese mafia as a way of understanding the impressive onset of Chinese migration to Italy in the early 1990s. And their reasoning seemed to be: Where did the Chinese obtain the money to migrate and to set up their own factories in such a short time and on such a massive scale? Well, there must have been criminal organizations that helped them. And look, didn’t the Triad and other Chinese diasporic criminals infiltrate the US in the past? That’s what’s happening to Italy now! In fact, these Chinese care only for work and do not come into contact with Italian society at all and they send their money back to China.
My research departs from this kind of reasoning and arrives at the conclusion that journalists resorted to the example of Chinese migration to Italy to more generally discuss and debate economic globalization and migrant integration. It’s not primarily about getting the facts right (although of course the history of media debates about the Chinese migration is rather intricate and cannot be summarized here); it’s also about using it as an example to talk about other changes in Italian society that migration played a major role in making.
How would you situate this research in the larger field of Migration Studies? How do you see it contributing to contemporary debates?
The book’s main contribution to Migration Studies is its focus on migration’s relation with the media in specific and with culture in general. As recent well-known introductory books to Migration Studies show (such as The Age of Migration by Castles, et al. and Migration Theory: Talking across Disciplines by Brettell and Hollifield), the field remains largely the domain of the social sciences, even though these books often indicate that cultural studies of migration is the new, emerging, or next frontier of research.
My book gives a substantial example of media and cultural studies of migration in relation to a specific migration. It is the first to examine both Italian and Chinese migrant coverage, and the dialogue that emerged between the media and public conversations regarding mass migration and economic globalization stimulated by it. A detailed media and cultural analysis of Chinese migration to Italy was needed to understand how the Italians and the Chinese migrants perceived this growing migrant community in their social lives and cultural imaginations. In providing the first substantial media and cultural study of this particular migration, I followed the call of sociologists Robin Cohen and Gunvor Jónsson for more cultural analysis in migration studies.
How would you characterize your research process for the book? Were there any methodological challenges that you encountered in the field?
I did extensive archival research in several news agencies, including Italy’s main public broadcaster, RAI, and its main private competitor, Mediaset. I also consulted materials in more regional archives, including those by Chinese migrants themselves. It was at first difficult to gain access to certain archives, such as Mediaset (while RAI is open to the public). But my network of academics in Italy helped me find the right contacts. It was also not easy to make connections with Chinese migrant sources, because 1) they were not always good with archiving, so many relevant materials were lost; 2) there was no organized archive so one had to sift through many physical copies of the newspapers and magazines; 3) they didn’t necessarily trust me as an outsider and as an academic when I requested to access their archives. Again, time and patience in the end gained me enough scope to access several such archives.
The main methodological challenge for me was to figure out how to make the dialogue between Italian media and Chinese migrant media materials work. The dialogue between pro-Chinese Italian media and anti-Chinese Italian media? Extremist media and mainstream media? Italian media and international media? The media in Italy is extremely politicized and very complex. So to arrive at a more general conclusion was not easy because one could easily get lost in so many positions and viewpoints about one particular migration.
Do you have any future plans to build on your findings in Migration and the Media?
I’m now writing a second book, which will be focused on migration and culture, particularly culture as in literature, cinema, Internet forums, and architecture. The context is contemporary Chinese migration to Italy and Italian migration to China. This project will enlarge the scope of the first book to include cultural dynamics other than the news media about the Chinese migration, Italian expats and architecture in China, and tourism in interaction with migration. Moreover, I will have a prominent angle on the role of American popular culture in regularizing cultural exchanges between Italy and China. For example, the Venetian Casino in Macau and in Las Vegas. The tentative title is Migration and Culture: Mobility between China and Italy via USA.
