Recent Concerns over Serious Public Claims of Substantial Increase in Chinese Criminality’s Seriousness in Italy: What Patterns of Organization, Market Involvement, and Social Embeddedness?

• In Event: WG Organized Crime and Criminal Networks Panel 2. Organized crime infiltration in the legal economy

Abstract

The research project will explore Chinese criminality and Chinese Organized Crime (COC) in Italy, concentrating precisely on what types of structures and activities could be individuated, and what circumstances determined their patterns of mobility and evolution, between 2000 and 2025. Current literature is poor, either outdated, or limited in geographical, substantial, or temporal scopes, or both. Consequently, dynamics related to Chinese criminality in Italy remains generally understudied, and especially the inner relationships established with the Italian society, at different levels (Becucci, 2018). To address this research gap, the study will resort to longitudinal and multidimensional methods to analyse episodes of Law Enforcement Agencies’ (LEAs) operations against Chinese criminal activities reported by media in Italy, in six criminal market domains, between 2000 and 2025. Then, the three most serious cases for each domain will be separately assessed through more in-deep analysis of judicial documents. The results aim at testing existing knowledge on Chinese criminality and COC in Italy, compared to new findings.
The research wants to assess whether the recently observable increase of Italian public concern and allegations over COC’s insurgence and sophistication are based on factual, empirically robust premises, or mainly derive from reductive, stereotyped, and moral panic conceptions of Chinese communities, culture, traditions, and criminal dimensions. This research may lead to establish new theoretical and empirical understandings challenging public views that conceptualize the determining factors of Chinese criminality as ethnically confined to their diaspora. Findings want to support public policies aimed at countering Chinese criminality in Italy, by empirically assessing what forms and activities’ modus operandi could be established, what is its mobility over the country, and what relationships it establishes with the Italian society at large. The final aim is to help sensibilizing the public against stereotyped conceptions of the phenomenon.

Author

• Alessandro Corti, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore