Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

The violent clashes between Chinese immigrants and the local police that happened earlier this month in Prato, Italy may seem shocking. After all, Chinese immigrants are more known for being hardworking and quiet than being provocative and combative.

Yet, it was not a surprise to me. In 2011, when I met some performers from Italy when they produced the American premiere of their play An Angel of the Slums on the Asia Society stage in New York, I knew a conflict like this could boil up.

The play, inspired by an ancient Chinese legend about good and evil, told a story of tensions between foreigners and locals in an unnamed small town. The production was sponsored by, among other groups, the Prato City Government.

At that time, rapidly increasing numbers of Chinese immigrants made up 30 percent of the population in Prato, the textile center of Italy, and they had already drawn some ire from the locals. One reason, as the Chinese and Italian performers of the play told me, was that the Chinese immigrants there didn't like to mingle with the locals. They worked hard in their own factories, lived with their own people, and in their own way. To the locals, these were not friends but invaders.

This was among the complaints in the recent conflict. Everyone, from the region's president to international and Chinese language media, raised the concern.

To be sure, the conflict didn't stem from a single source. The police, who went to the Chinese neighborhood to inspect a Chinese-run textile firm, could have been less heavy-handed. But a lack of integration by the Chinese immigrants certainly didn't help ease tensions, and in many ways exacerbated them.

The Chinese tendency to remain apart from the mainstream is not a problem confined only to Italy. In the years since I met the performers, I've heard the same complaints in different countries more and more frequently.

In Belize, a country that has no diplomatic relationship with the mainland but where there are a lot of Chinese immigrants, a local taxi driver pointed to the modern-looking buildings at the ocean front and told me that all these new hotels belong to Chinese developers. But the Chinese have their own village, and their own lives, he said. Belize people know little about these newcomers to their country.

"They are not interested in the local culture. They don't tend to learn English," the driver said.

Last summer, the New Yorker published a story by Peter Hessler about Chinese who sell lingerie in Egypt. The story suggested that no matter how successful they are, Chinese don't show great interest in the local culture, religion or politics.

"On the whole this subject doesn't interest Chinese dealers. Few of them are well educated, and they don't perceive themselves as being engaged in a cultural exchange," Hessler wrote.

In New York, Steve Orlins, President of the National Committee on United States-China relations, shared his concern about Chinese international students in the US with a group of Chinese reporters at a press conference in 2014. Nowadays, he noted, Chinese students tend to talk to and hang out only with one another rather than interacting with Americans. 

It may sound perplexing why people travel so far to stay in their own world and with their own compatriots. But indeed, it's not hard to understand. People all like to choose the easier way to live, consciously or unconsciously. Intermingling in an alien culture always requires more efforts.

But compared to the older generation of Chinese immigrants who built Chinatowns as their havens, integration may be a greater challenge for Chinese immigrants today. This is simply because there are more Chinese living abroad than ever and we are able to form our own communities anywhere in the world more easily.

These closed communities may even make some business sense. In Belize, cash-strapped locals often beg shops run by their own people to allow them to buy on credit. But they rarely do so at Chinese-owned shops that don't respond to such pressure. In Egypt, Hessler noted that the indifference of Chinese shop owners to local matters may have brought them more business because customers buying lingerie for whatever reason know the shop owners won't gossip. And in New York, the ever larger Chinese community has cultivated more and more new businesses that are by the Chinese and for the Chinese.

But in the long run, there is a risk. When things go sour, it could be as bad as the situation in Prato. Even if there is no big conflict, we are still missing out on the beauty of a diverse world if we stick to close to our own kind and ignore others.  

The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com