Italian law in China? The Tientsin concession and its legal status

Differently from the Italian colonies in Africa, whose status has never been put under discussion during colonial times, the Italian concession in Tientsin (today’s Tianjin) has been a possession that received less attention from the Italian government. The same facts of daily life in that remote Italian outpost were minimally present in the Italian chronicles of the time. The Italian scholars who dealt with the possession engaged in a long debate about its legal status giving preference to considering the territory as a concession. Rereading history after many decades, with a broader framework of elements to consider, it might be possible to arrive at different results. In the wake of the most recent studies aimed at reconsidering - even critically - the Italian colonial experience from a legal point of view, this work tries to move in this direction, to try to better understand what the real legal status of the possession was, beyond the official declamations, trying to take into account the different data in possession of scholars who want to deal with the subject.