Do the Chinese never die?

Even the great ones fall into the trap of urban legends: it recently happened to the most famous Italian philosopher in the world, Giorgio Agamben. He, in a long article written to criticize the green pass, cited the story of the alleged suicides of lemmings. An urban legend that, in reality, had already been exposed many years before. Obviously, unbeknownst to poor Agamben.

But among the intellectuals there are also those who have given further credibility to an urban legend that has been circulating in Europe for some time. The person in charge is Roberto Saviano and the legend is that of the "alleged" immortality of the Chinese. In his first book, "Gomorra", the Neapolitan writer had said that the bodies of the Chinese who died in Europe were crammed into containers headed for China. In our part of Italy, according to Saviano's account, only the identity documents remain which, thanks to the complicity of Chinese organized crime, would be given to other compatriots.

The urban legend is analyzed and dissected by Severino Colombo, author of a book with the title perhaps a little excessive but with an extremely interesting content "101 bullshit we have all believed at least once in our life".

Roberto Saviano, it was said, was to blame for giving further credibility to a fake news that had been around for some time: in the 1980s the sinologist Marie Holzman wrote the essay "Asia in Paris" and, noting the low mo rtality rate of people who came from the Far East, made fun of the fact that the Chinese had discovered the secret of eternal life. In fact, the French scholar herself hypothesized the passage of documents. A suspicion that went beyond the French borders and also began to circulate in Germany, Belgium and Holland.

Those rumors also reached Italy. Except, in this case, someone took the trouble to go and look at the documents. And, indeed, by checking the birth registers of Turin, Milan and Rome it turned out that the number of deaths among people from China was extremely low. Are the suspicions legitimate? In reality, the reason is much simpler: the average age of Chinese residing in Europe is very low: in Paris, for example, 71 percent of Chinese are under the age of 35, three percent over 65. Similar figures also in Rome where the over 55s were, in 2005, six percent.

To support this interpretation, the data on the demographic evolution of foreign communities residing in Milan between 1997 and 2001: the death rate among the Chinese is more or less the same as that recorded in the Filipino and Egyptian communities. The confirmation also comes from Caritas that in 2009 regular foreigners in Italy were 7.2 percent of the population, a figure that rises to around ten if we also consider people without a residence permit. Well, the average age of these immigrants is 33 (and, of course, it would be even lower if illegal immigrants could also be counted). It is hardly conceivable that such a young population could have a high mortality rate.

Normally, many Chinese, after a lifetime of work in the West, choose to spend their old age at home. Exactly what the oriental man considered the father of Cagliari's Chinatown, Kanghsiastu, did. Arriving in the city in the early 1920s, he decided to return to China a few years later. Only, in the meantime, the eastern country was going through many civil wars of that period. And he, to secure his children, contacted his friends from Cagliari and made them arrive on the island.

A tragic episode that took place in Cagliari in the summer of four years also disproves the urban legend: a twenty-four year old Chinese woman, who arrived in the city to spend a few days of vacation, died while she was bathing on the beach of Calamosca. An episode that hit the headlines also for another reason: the young woman's mother, after having crossed half the world to reach her daughter, gave her green light to the organ harvesting.

That of the Chinese who do not die is an urban legend that is gradually destined to disappear thanks to technology: the Chinese government itself is promoting funerals online. In practice, he is pushing for funeral ceremonies to be filmed so that even relatives in the motherland can hug, at least virtually, the deceased loved one.