6. Italy in China in the Inter-war Years

In this chapter, the import and export between Italy and China will be examined, within a particular and complex period such as that between the two world wars. It was characterized in Italy by the rise of Mussolini and the fascist government. The accelerated Italian industrialization process following the Great War had become somewhat unbalanced. This disorderly and artificial expansion would have required, at the end of the conflict, a radical restructuring and a renewal of the plans to allow the resumption of peacetime production and the reintegration of the productive apparatus into a market system. In 1922, the political crisis reached a peak in Italy: the March on Rome of 28 October 1922 carried out by the Blackshirts saw the then king of Italy Vittorio Emanuele III refuse to sign the declaration of a state of siege and decided to entrust Benito Mussolini with the task of forming a new government. The economic and financial objectives of the government programme in fascist times, in short, were: (a) to reduce the deficit of the public budget; (b) to pursue a “productivist” economic policy that would provide more space for private entrepreneurship; (c) to make available a greater share of national savings for private investments (even if, despite Italy being a rural country and the exaltation of the myth of the land and the return to the countryside, its economic policy aimed to favour the interests of the great industrial groups) (Zamagni in Dalla periferia al centro. La seconda rinascita economica dell’Italia 1861–1981. Il Mulino, Bologna, 1990, 349–377; Bof in Grande Guerra e primo Dopoguerra (Chap. V, pp. 89–118), Economia e politica economica in età fascista (Chap. VI pp. 119–156), Dalla guerra d’Africa alla seconda guerra mondiale (Chap. VII, pp. 157–186) in L’Italia economica, 2015, 118–119). In 1927, the labour charter was issued, which was the manifesto of the corporate state: economic life, therefore, came to depend more and more on the state. The crisis of ‘29 involved, among other changes, the definitive crisis of mixed banks, thereby consolidating the process of banking concentration. Moreover, even before the political circumstances underlying the Ethiopian War and the sanctions imposed by the League of Nations, other factors, such as the defence of the gold standard of the lira to the bitter end, contributed to the affirmation of a markedly restrictive policy, which meant that Italy became increasingly isolated from the international market (Petri in Storia economica d’Italia. Dalla Grande Guerra al miracolo economico (1918–1963). Il Mulino, Bologna, 2002, 113–157; Bof in Grande Guerra e primo Dopoguerra (Chap. V, pp. 89–118), Economia e politica economica in età fascista (Chap. VI pp. 119–156), Dalla guerra d’Africa alla seconda guerra mondiale (Chap. VII, pp. 157–186) in L’Italia economica, 2015, 158–159).