the authorities are worried.

Chinese migrants have been pouring into Prato to work in the city's thousands of factories, warehouses and sweatshops that supply the cloth and yarns to the Italian fashion industry

Today Prato has the largest Chinese community in the country - about 25,000 people, nearly 15% of the city's population.


And the authorities are worried

Many of the Chinese here are 'clandestini' - illegal. We have big difficulties catching them. And since they arrived, crime in the city has risen," says Francesco Nannucci, the head of investigations at the Prato police.





The police patrol Prato's Chinatown every day - an area full of Chinese shops, services and restaurants. Nearly all of them have sprung up in the last few years.


On one raid, ten undocumented Chinese workers were discovered in a side-street sweatshop, machine-sewing clothes.

There was a child present, beds, a bathroom and a kitchen. They slept, cooked, worked and brought up their children in this small warehouse.



Milan's Chinatown holds examples of the merging cultures<br><br>Post edited by: linsi, at: 2007/08/03 17:58

Chinese workers pull trolleys through the streets of Milan


This is a Chinese invention: ' made in Italy' goods produced under Chinese conditions.



In the workshop at the back of the warehouse Cheng and his family toil away to produce these clothes in as short a time as possible, as cheaply as possible.

They can undercut the prices - and the wages - of their Italian counterparts. They may be paid as little as 2 euros an hour (£1.50), and 20 dresses might be produced for only 150 euros wholesale.


The clothes are bought by sellers from all over Italy and the rest of Europe.

Prato has become a main distribution centre for what is called &quot;Pronto Moda&quot; or &quot;fast fashion&quot;.

Prato has also become a centre for the import of cheap clothing from China itself.

Designer clothing shops adorns the Galleria Milan




Growing tensions


Made in Italy&quot; but sometimes &quot;Made in Italy by Chinese&quot;.

Read more.. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6926181.stm



This is China's art of trade-
share your thoughts-

my brother-in-law who is based in new york always talk
with chinese traders in their own china town and it has
similar stories on how chinese get into the big apple-

there are positive signs when one reads the whole article-specially when we read between the lines.

[color=#008000]

why do these chinese get out of china
to do their trades when China now in itself
gets the bigest economic boom
in asia?

why do they get out and seek other places
than their own? reports say that they
pour in illegally-

why?





Many nations are worried?

Articles about regions worried about chinese traders
causing demographic and economic threats are reported
in tabloids.

but..how do they handle situations like this?



[/color]


another related story:
There is, Mr Satpaev says, a real worry in the region that China will simply become too much to handle, and that the growing number of goods and people it sends will pose a serious demographic and economic threat.

Trade dilemma on China-Kazakh border http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6925861.stm

<br><br>Post edited by: linsi, at: 2007/08/03 18:34

There are also clothes made in Australia by Chinese..

truly by sheer size of population, CHina is taking the world by storm!

Just to provide you another perspective, our counterparts in PRC (People's Republic of China) are really intellectuals, they can absorb mountains of instructional manual in a week, where a normal Asian can only absorb in a month or so.

Its probably the way they are trained that allows them to do things faster than a mere mortal.

Alhtough, I am not a good position to judge the quality of their work I still am impressed by their capacity to absorb knowledge in such a short span of time.

My dear filipino friends,

It's simply a question of Supply &amp; Demand. AND, after all, it's cultural issue...

Hi Caroline

Can you detail more ?

In a free economy market, supplies will go where demands are. Doing business in Western countries are much more simpler than in PRC where competition is unimaginably keen &amp; the distribution channels are fragmented. On the cultural side, discounting is just a habitual practice in the Mainland &amp; people think &quot;the moon is brighter in the West&quot;...