Italy's Encounters with Modern China Imperial Dreams, Strategic Ambitions

by Marinelli, Maurizio; Andornino, Giovanni

• ISBN13: 9781137290922
• ISBN10: 1137290927
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-11-07
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Relations between Italy and China have long been clouded by myths and projection biases, and only sparse scientific literature explores how the paths of these two countries have been intersecting in the modern era, once the pursuit of nationhood and status within international society had belatedly emerged as the defining traits of their morphing identities. This edited volume is proposed to the attention of the international community of scholars, practitioners, undergraduate and graduate students of Italy and China as a first attempt to offer a comprehensive account in the English language of the rationales and dynamics shaping the reiterated encounter between two actors which in 2014 remain amongst the world's top-10 economies. The cycles of friendship and enmity that have marked the past 150 years of relations between Italy and China – culminating in the current decade of strategic partnership – are here examined in interdisciplinary fashion by both scholars and practitioners across ten chapters proposing original insights through fresh sources.

Author Biography

Maurizio Marinelli is Senior Lecturer in East Asian History at the University of Sussex. He is also a Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths University of London and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian Center on China in the World at the Australian National University. He specialises in contemporary China's intellectual and urban history. His research investigates how China's relations with the rest of the world have influenced historical narratives and shaped ways of representing each other within their respective intellectual discourses. He is currently working on the socio-spatial transformation of the port city of Tianjin from the foreign concessions era (1860-1945) to the present.

Giovanni Andornino is an assistant professor of International Relations of East Asia at the University of Torino and vice president of the Torino World Affairs Institute. He is currently an associate at the China Research Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction
Maurizio Marinelli and Giovanni Andornino

1: Projecting Italianità on the Chinese space: The construction of the 'aristocratic' concession in Tianjin (1901-1947)
Maurizio Marinelli

2: At the dawn of modern Italo-Chinese relations: Ludovico Nocentini's experience
Aglaia De Angeli

3: The Italian presence in China: Historical trends and perspectives (1902-1947)
Guido Samarani

4: Rethinking the distance, reframing the exotic: Italian tales of Shanghai through the Republican and early Maoist eras
Laura De Giorgi

5: The beginning and the end of the idyllic relations between Mussolini's Italy and Jiang
Jieshi's China (1930-1937)
Michele Fatica

6: The Normalization of Relations between Italy and the People's Republic of China
Enrico Fardella

7: Strategic ambitions in times of transition: Key patterns in contemporary Italy-China relations
Giovanni Andornino

8: Economic relations between Italy and China
Giorgio Prodi

9: The role of the Italian Development Cooperation in Sino-Italian relations
Rosario Centola


10: Italy's engagement with the People's Republic of China in the context of the EU-China strategic partnership
Pietro Sferra Carini