Abstract: This paper focuses on the only Italian concession in China, which was located in the Hebei district of the modern municipality of Tianjin. With the final Protocol of 1901, following the Boxers’ repression, Italy received an allotment of 5.91% of the Boxer indemnity [26,617,005 Haiguan taels, equal to about 1.55 Chinese national (silver) dollars, or 99,713,769 gold Lire], extraterritoriality privileges in the Legation Quarter in Beijing, as well as the concession in perpetuity of a small zone on the left bank of the Hai River, in Tianjin, on which to develop an Italian concession.

As an Italian scholar of China, I am particularly interested in comparing and contrasting the theoretical bases underlying the descriptions of the Italian concession in China, the U.S. and Europe, to interrogate the problem of historical, cultural, and political contingencies that have shaped different modes of knowledge production and derivative discourses.

Through an in-depth comparative analysis of primary and secondary sources written in various languages and time periods, I will investigate the historical reasons behind the emphasis placed, in different representations, on specific social-economic, institutional, and cultural aspects of the Italian concession. I will discuss, for example, the notion of shaping the Italian Concession in Tianjin as a venue of “Italian character,” especially in terms of space re-presentation and cultural superimposition, which emerges as a constant trait from many Italian sources.

My intention is to use the sources in a dialogic way in order to elucidate the reasons for what I argue is often a deliberate informative and descriptive selectivity, revealing contesting “images” of the Italian concession. What will emerge will not be an illusory objective reconstruction of the identity of the Italian concession, but more likely two (or more) types of – often competing and contentious – stories. These narratives are informed by socially encoded and constructed discursive practices, generated by varying socio-political and economic interests, and often time motivated by precise speculative transactions (as in the case of the expropriation of the “filthy Chinese village,” justified by Ambassador Gallina arguing that “all the other powers proceeded to the expropriation as soon as they occupied the area of their concession”).

The mediated representations of “reality” found in selected sources reveal a fascinating game of power, where the colonizer and the colonized sometimes exchange their roles as agents, victims, and victimizers. With this paper I will shed light on some of the questions that emerged during my preliminary research conducted in Italy during the summer 2003 and at U.C. Berkeley in January 2004: To what degree the representations of the Italian concession in Tianjin were influenced by the sense of national pride, the legacy of an imperial past, and the (Italian) colonial project of the time? How much were they informed by the search for a new identity both for Italy and China? And finally, looking through the lens of the language, what are the narrative presuppositions which generate the “imagined community/ies” of the Italian concession in Tianjin?