These migrants, who arrived first in the Netherlands and France, and later moved towards the Mediterranean, have exceptional mobility and organisation. In Europe, most Chinese immigrants come from the province of Zhejiang, and largely from the town of Qingtian, the epicentre of Chinese emigration to Spain and Italy, and a region that has developed rapidly thanks to remittances. The second element that makes this story even more complex is the spreading across the globe of networks that, at their roots, are curiously highly concentrated. If the traditional sectors are already saturated by other Chinese and the new entrepreneur has neither fear nor scruples, he can move into completely illegal sectors, such as prostitution, gambling and drug trafficking. Selling omelette skewers or finished shirts at very little profit, the new employer has to manage somehow to pay off the start-up loan, and so resorts to bringing in more immigrants through his own business, putting them into debt and exploiting them. The new immigrant, after paying off the debt for being brought to the promised land, subsequently pays to be legalised and to obtain papers – as if by magic, Chinese agencies controlled or participated in by the same bosses also have a hand in that pot.įinally, the new immigrant takes out a debt with the network in the form of an informal credit to start up his own business, and this way he moves up from the ranks of the exploited to the ranks of the exploiters. The instability and the living and working conditions imposed on the workers is sometimes brutal. The system – which we have also investigated in other countries – works more or less like this: the Chinese businessman “imports” illegal labour through his networks and through “snakeheads”, and exploits those workers over the years to run his business (restaurants, shops, workshops), until the debt has been paid in full. Subscribe Exceptional mobility and organisation Import-export is the only one of these sectors probed in the current operation, but the reverberations likely extend to other traditional sectors that Chinese immigrants are active in – restaurants, clothes retailers, agencies, realtors, bars, and so on. The first is the expansion of inter-Chinese criminal networks in our territory, which are organised in pyramids and proliferate in parallel in various sectors. Two elements stand out in the police operations over recent years against human trafficking, exploitation of workers and tax fraud. Operation Emperor has exposed a web of money laundering and tax evasion of gigantic proportions. It is precisely this failure to integrate into the host societies – expressed by the concept of “Chinatown” – that has helped give rise to “states within a state”, in the words of several police inspectors, to a kind of Chinese extraterritoriality where justice or working conditions, for example, are determined by the Chinese and not by the state. But this migration, dizzying in its evolution in countries like France, Italy and Spain, has not come with full social integration, but too often has been limited to strictly business contacts. Like all immigrants, the Chinese leave home with no other purpose than profit. Though one must not judge the whole Chinese community by its parts and not all the 170,000 Chinese living in Spain can or should be judged by the same yardstick, the spread of Chinese businesses through Spain and to other parts of the world contains aspects that invite reflection at the very least. For a group that makes discretion the bedrock of its way of life – and one of its strengths – the information that has been splashed across the headlines could not be worse: wild tales of how criminal gangs have allegedly defrauded the Spanish Treasury of 35,000 million euros, violent extortion by the gang headed by Gao Ping, corruption and businesses tied to prostitution and to drug-trafficking. Surely not in its worst nightmares could the Chinese community in Spain have imagined an event so damning to their image as Operación Cheqian-Emperador (Operation Emperor).
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