Global Challenges, Local Resilience: Rethinking European Chinatowns

21^st century China has gained an ambivalent albeit powerful position in both European policies and popular imaginations as potential market and collaborator who is also a fierce competitor, whose goods and capital threaten former European spheres of interest and even European economies themselves.   Yet, these repeated concerns in the press, among policy makers and in imaginative literature need to be balanced by analysis of other Chinese who, for more than a century, have created places of integration and hybridity across Europe sometimes in opposition to Chinese governance itself.  In older Chinatowns of the UK, France and the Netherlands as well as emergent settlements in Italy, Spain and other European cities and states, Chinese entrepreneurs have created new business niches, revitalized decaying neighborhoods, established new networks of national and international business, and contributed – as objects and subjects -- to debates over the diversification of European citizenship within cities, states and the EU as a whole.  Rather than seeing these Chinese in their first, second, third and fourth generations as an external threat, this paper draws on multi-site fieldwork over the past decade in Chinatowns worldwide and careful reviews of local studies and press to consider alternative readings.   It suggests that Chinatowns and Chinese can be seen as participants in urban revitalization while building bridges that may be of value to both varied European hosts and to a China whose emergent state globalization intersects with these truly resilient enclaves, their struggles and their adaptations.