This was published 5 months ago
Taiwan’s Kinmen islands are a stone’s throw from China. Its inhabitants are torn
By Lisa Visentin and Daniel Ceng
There is an uneasy tranquillity at the edge of the water border that separates the Taiwanese islands of Kinmen from mainland China, an unofficial dividing line between democracy and authoritarianism where Captain Yan-wei Lin’s boat is idling in the rain.
It is the second morning of China’s two days of war games encircling Taiwan and its outlying islands last week, and Lin and other boat operators have been advised by the local fishing association to take extra care and report any Chinese ships encroaching on Kinmen’s restricted waters to authorities.
A military vehicle patrols on Da-Dan island, where Taiwanese soldiers are stationed near the maritime boundary with China, in Kinmen County, Taiwan.Credit: Daniel Ceng
From Lin’s location inside Kinmen’s boundary, a miserable fog has obscured the skyline of the nearby Chinese port city of Xiamen, a bustling metropolis of more than 4 million people just three kilometres away. Also hidden is the presence of a 92-metre Chinese coast guard vessel on the other side of the water border, detected on a marine traffic phone app.
“The Chinese coast guard is very aggressive,” Lin says as he starts up the motor to make a swift departure. “They don’t honour the boundary, and play by their own rules. They are unpredictable.”
He doesn’t see the drills as a cause for alarm. Like so many Kinmenese, he is inured to the aggression from the neighbouring giant in whose shadow they all must find a way to live.
“We are all quite numb about this idea of Chinese invading us. This is not new for us. We’ve been living with this since I was in primary school and it has never happened in 30 years,” the 36-year-old said.
The drills, jointly carried out by the PLA’s army, navy, air force and rocket force, were the largest military exercises conducted by China in more than a year, and were intended as “strong punishment” for “separatist acts”, three days after Taiwan’s new president, Lai Ching-te, was inaugurated.
In a break with similar large-scale military exercises in recent years, Chinese state media reported this was the first time the coast guard had executed drills in waters around Kinmen and the neighbouring island of Matsu, claiming it had “completely shattered Taiwan authorities’ notion of the so-called ‘restricted waters’.”
Kinmen, a rocky archipelago in the Taiwan Strait with a main island and other islets, is less than 10 kilometres from the Chinese mainland and almost 200 kilometres from Taiwan’s main island. This proximity has infused Kinmen with a complex identity, one born of its past as a frontline battleground against invading Chinese Communist Party forces, and the contemporary close ties – culturally and economically – many Kinmenese residents have to the mainland.
The hallmarks of war are scattered across Kinmen. Rusted steel anti-invasion spikes protrude from beaches, and cliff tops are lined with abandoned military forts and tunnel systems.
Signs and monuments bear triumphant victory declarations of the Republic of China (Taiwan’s official name) and its nationalist Kuomintang troops in repelling the communist army that attacked Kinmen but failed to capture it at the end of the Chinese civil war and routinely shelled it for decades afterwards.
“Long live the Republic of China. Stand and inherit the fighting spirit of Kinmen,” reads one monument at a roundabout. On a clifftop facing the Chinese mainland, a massive loudspeaker that once boomed messages of democracy and beckoned PLA troops to abandon communism for freedom has become a popular tourist attraction.
A woman takes pictures of her parents in front of the Beishan Broadcasting Wall in Kinmen, which boomed messages inviting Chinese soldiers to defect to Taiwan.Credit: Daniel Ceng
And yet despite these ever-present reminders of war, many locals see it as a remote possibility that Kinmen could once again come under military attack should Chinese President Xi Jinping make good on his increasingly bellicose pledges to “reunify” Taiwan with the mainland.
“Taiwan is only a chip on a gambling table between the United States and China, and Kinmen is caught between that,” says Sen-Po Tung, a local councillor in Kinmen County.
In any event, he says Kinmen’s civilian population is totally unprepared for any military invasion by China.
“If there is a war nearing, at least we should be getting prepared so we can minimise the damage and brace for that invasion with military preparation, defence preparation and evacuation,” he says. “We haven’t seen any of these sorts of policies coming from Taipei. We feel we are not prepared for anything.”
The Taiwanese government did not respond to a request for comment.
Today there are several thousand Taiwanese amphibious soldiers known as “frogmen” stationed around Kinmen island. They could be seen departing Kinmen’s shores for naval exercises during the Chinese drills.
Reports emerged earlier this year that the US also had special forces stationed there training Taiwanese troops, though this has never been confirmed by the Pentagon and US officials were quick to minimise the reports.
People pose for pictures with an abandoned American M18 army tank at Ou Cuo Beach in Kinmen.Credit: Daniel Ceng
Mark Harrison, a Taiwan expert from the University of Tasmania, says the military history of Kinmen as a place the PLA repeatedly failed to capture matters greatly to China. But while its proximity to the mainland makes it a vulnerable target, invading Kinmen would be an act of war that would demand a response from the US and its allies, and is not a step that Beijing would take lightly.
“It is possible for Beijing to take control of Kinmen and Matsu, and it would be enormously challenging for Taipei to stop it. But it is a very high-risk scenario and Beijing would need to have a plan beyond that,” Harrison says.
In a side street off a busy commercial strip, Song-wei Wang’s family have been running a stationery shop from the front of their home for generations.
The 37-year-old traces his family roots in Kinmen back more than a century to the Qing dynasty, though he was born in Taipei and only moved permanently to the island seven years ago to help run the business.
Despite living in Taiwan’s capital for decades, he has not absorbed the strong sense of Taiwanese identity that many of his peers in Taipei proudly assert. He sees himself as Kinmenese or ethnically Chinese, or a blend of the two.
Stationery shop owner Song-wei Wang at his ancestral home in Kinmen.Credit: Daniel Ceng
An invasion by China is not necessarily an existential threat, he says, as long as Kinmen people can continue to live happy, fulfilling lives. The political system is a secondary concern.
“I don’t want war. No one does,” he says, adding: “I’ve been to China multiple times. I didn’t see people crying about their struggles. They were living happily there.
“So even if China were to take over Kinmen, under the CCP system we might be able to continue our way of life here and find our happiness.”
It’s a perspective made more intriguing by the fact that Wang has political aspirations, and dabbled in democratic elections two years ago when he unsuccessfully ran as a KMT candidate for the local council, though he has since quit the party.
Kinmen is a political stronghold for the KMT, the largest of Taiwan’s opposition parties. At the peak of Cold War tensions in the1950s, when the KMT ruled Taiwan as a single-party state under Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership, more than 100,000 KMT troops were stationed on Kinmen to fight communist troops.
These days, the KMT has morphed from an anti-communist party into one that promotes more friendly ties with Beijing, a position viewed with deep suspicion by its critics as being too “pro-China”.
A Taiwanese coast guard vessel patrols along the Xiamen-Kinmen passage near the maritime boundary with China.Credit: Daniel Ceng
It’s a label that KMT lawmaker Jessica Chen, a colourful politician who represents Kinmen in the Legislative Yuan – Taiwan’s national parliament in Taipei – proudly embraces.
“I am pro-Beijing,” she says, clarifying that her definition is based on stable ties with China, not embracement of its political system. “My people in Kinmen, we want good relations and better communication with China. We are Kinmenese, but we are also ethnically Chinese.”
Many Kinmenese regularly visit the mainland on day trips or for business and have a spouse or other family members who are Chinese, she says, giving them a greater affinity with the mainland than with Taipei. The dialect spoken in Kinmen is similar that spoken in Xiamen, the Chinese city across the bay – as is the food.
Chen says the island’s economy has lost $200 million in tourism and trade annually since 2019, when China suspended tour groups from travelling to Kinmen. Hopes of these tourism links being restored were dashed in February when two Chinese fishermen drowned after their illegal fishing boat capsized while fleeing the Taiwan coast guard.
Speaking from her parliamentary office in Taipei the day after Lai Ching-te’s presidential inauguration, Chen is preparing to go into the chamber to debate controversial legislative changes, dressed wearing a cycling helmet, knee pads and wrist guards. Her get-up is mostly a stunt. Days earlier she was allegedly bitten by a government member in an unedifying brawl in the parliament over controversial legislative changes put forward by the KMT and a smaller opposition force, the Taiwan People’s Party.
Kuomintang politician Jessica Chen Yu-Jen represents Kinmen and favours closer ties with China.Credit: Daniel Ceng
Outside parliament, thousands of protesters have gathered on the streets to campaign against the laws, accusing the KMT and TPP of selling out the country’s democracy at a time when China is seeking to influence the country’s politics. The laws would give the legislature new powers to launch investigations and would criminalise contempt of parliament by government officials and carry a jail sentence.
The antics in the national parliament, the latest in a series of embarrassing spectacles that have plagued Taiwan’s politics, are almost a world away from the slow-paced life on Kinmen.
Huang has just finished Saturday lunch with his family at his home across the road from a war museum, where tourists can walk through a network of underground civil defence tunnels.
Now in his 80s, he can remember fleeing for cover from a sudden barrage of shelling by the Chinese army as a teenager in 1954 on his way home from his part-time job as postman. He is untroubled by the latest tensions between Beijing and Taipei.
“I don’t think there’s any possibility of a war with China,” says Huang, preferring to be known only by his surname. “It’s really nothing to worry about.”
Aria, 16, fears the loss of freedom were China to take control of Kinmen.Credit: Daniel Ceng
His granddaughter, Aria, 16, is less convinced. A member of the relentlessly online Generation Z, she has known unparalleled freedom of speech in Taiwan foreign to her forebears.
“I’m really frightened. I want to escape if there’s a war coming here,” she says.
“Google, YouTube, Facebook – that is part of our way of life. We are not used to being controlled. If the CCP is to come here and take those freedoms, we will lose everything.”
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