The Wenzhounese are famed in China for leaving their home town to do business elsewhere, and excelling at it. We take a look at their impact on business and society
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskMr Wang is sitting in a poky café in Pantin in north-eastern Paris, where the city gives way to the: grim suburbs with high populations of poor migrants. He recalls his childhood with sadness. His father was earning a decent income at a state-owned transport firm. “It was not necessary for him to leave China,” he says. But his mother, who had a job in a village textile factory, was not satisfied.
The Wenzhounese in Europe are concentrated in a few cities. You rarely chance upon their delicately flavoured seafood cuisine , let alone hear snatches of their dialect, as you walk through streets elsewhere, not even in multicultural London. Among non-Chinese, even Wenzhou’s name is little known . Yet in the places where most Wenzhounese have settled, their impact on business and society is huge.
But before going into business, there is a rite of passage—hard graft. Many Wenzhounese in Europe have similar stories of a long and tough induction to European life, toiling in tiny factories. Some migrants have had to work years to pay off debts incurred by payments to the “cattle”, as Wenzhounese call the people-smugglers. The trust circle may have helped to provide the cash, but it had to be returned.
Ding Jinrong is the 56-year-old boss of one of these businesses, Hermosa Fast Fashion. His part-one story is typical: sneaking into Italy by road in 1991 via Hungary and Austria, then making his way to Prato where he worked and slept in factories . Back then, he was alone. He had left his wife behind in their village outside Wenzhou. “It was a hard life,” he chuckles. “But what could you do?”
Wenzhou’s links to Europe far precede the influx of the past 30 or 40 years. The first long-term settlement of Wenzhounese on the continent dates back more than a century. During the first world war, the allies needed for labour—their own young men were needed to fight instead. Chinese people helped to make up the numbers. About 135,000 of them joined an allied organisation called the Chinese Labour Corps.
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