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Saturday 17 September 2011
Once a Redoubt Against China, Taiwan’s Outpost Evolves
KINMEN, Taiwan — Burrowing just a few feet beneath the surface of this island in the Taiwan Strait turns up remnants of what was once the most militarized zone on earth.
Once a Redoubt Against China, Taiwan’s Outpost Evolves
By EDWARD WONG and XIYUN YANG 16 September 2011
KINMEN, Taiwan — Burrowing just a few feet beneath the surface of this island in the Taiwan Strait turns up remnants of what was once the most militarized zone on earth.
Concrete tunnels that once served as air-raid shelters run beneath villages like a network of capillaries. The threat from Mao and the People’s Republic of China began in 1949, when Communist soldiers trying to invade Taiwan made an ill-fated beach landing on this island, a few miles off the southeast coast of the mainland. Five years later, Chinese forces shelled the island for months, prompting the United States to contemplate using nuclear weapons against China. But even that attack did not prepare the island’s residents and Taiwanese soldiers for the artillery barrage that came in 1958: a half-million shells over 44 days that killed hundreds. The Communists then switched strategies: for the next two decades, the shells they lobbed every other day were loaded with propaganda leaflets.
Thus has this windswept island occupied a unique position in the precarious relationship between China and Taiwan, which has de facto independence but is considered a rebel province by the Communists.
Since 2008, as relations between Taiwan and China have warmed, Kinmen, once called Quemoy in the West, has stood as a test case for how some Taiwanese are calibrating their growing dependence on economic ties with China. The people of Kinmen consider themselves culturally closer to the nearby mainland province of Fujian than to Taiwan, and are debating how much to welcome mainlanders’ money and influence. Among the issues at play are whether to build a bridge to the Fujianese city of Xiamen; open a casino for mainland tourists; and adjust portrayals of anti-Communist military battles at tourist sites in language more palatable to the visitors. In July, mainland tourists, once restricted to coming only on tour groups, began arriving independently by ferry from Xiamen.
But to some, there remains a line that should not be crossed.
“Kinmen and Taiwan will grow closer to China to make money off of it, but they will never reunite with China,” said Chen Yi-liang, who was stationed here in the army for two decades and now lives near the coast.
In that sense, Kinmen is a mirror of the hopes and anxieties across much of Asia during China’s resurgence.
The island has a population of 100,000. It has farmland and deserted stretches of beach and even a smattering of European-style villas. Those were built by residents of Kinmen who worked or lived in parts of Southeast Asia starting in the Qing dynasty and were struck by the colonial architecture. (Emigrants from Guangdong Province, in southern China, also built the same kinds of villas in their hometowns.)
Kinmen was a naval garrison during the Qing, but under the Kuomintang, who fled to Taiwan after losing a civil war to the Communists, it became a fortress. When Mr. Chen arrived a few decades ago, there were about 80,000 soldiers on the island, a fifth less than at the height of tensions in the 1950s. Tsai Cheng-wang, a professor at National Quemoy University, estimates that 10 million Taiwanese have participated in military service on Kinmen.
“It is a bitter experience for all Taiwanese men, but it’s something we will always remember,” he said. “I don’t think these memories are going anywhere anytime soon.”
Famously, Justin Yifu Lin, the chief economist of the World Bank, defected at age 26 to the mainland from his military post here supposedly by swimming to Xiamen. There is still an outstanding warrant for his arrest in Taiwan.
The number of soldiers on Kinmen has dropped to just several thousand. They wander the island in their green uniforms, sometimes brushing shoulders with mainland tourists at the sites that commemorate Kuomintang stands against the Communists. Some of the civil defense tunnels have been renovated for tourism. On the northwest coast, there is a preserved concrete gun emplacement outside a military museum, which praises the Kuomintang victory in the 1949 Battle of Guningtou. A centerpiece is the jeep in which Chiang Kai-shek supposedly rode when he reviewed troops after the expulsion of the Communist invaders.
Mainlanders are officially barred from the military memorials, but many sneak glimpses. A debate started up among museum administrators a few years ago over whether to change some of the wording on the displays to make them less insulting to mainlanders, even though the mainlanders want to see the original Taiwanese version. Eventually, signs that labeled the Communist army as “gongfei,” or Communist bandits, were altered to refer instead to the People’s Liberation Army.
“On Kinmen, for 50 years in their self-presentation and propaganda, they’ve been a bulwark against P.R.C. expansionism, and now they have to find a way to welcome it and leverage it and generate benefits from it,” said Michael Szonyi, a professor of Chinese history at Harvard who wrote about Kinmen in “Cold War Island.” “The people on Kinmen have to very quickly adjust to the conversion of their former enemy into their economic lifeline.”
The island’s residents have always tried to exploit their unique position, he said. At times, they have emphasized the sacrifices they made during wartime in order to get more compensation from the Taiwanese government. At others, they have played down the history of conflict with China in order to highlight their position as a laboratory for closer relations.
Local politicians strongly supported a proposal by some officials in Taipei to build a bridge between Xiamen and Kinmen. But a study started in 2008 by the government of President Ma Ying-jeou, the Kuomintang member who supports reconciliation with China, determined that it would be too costly. A smaller bridge was ordered built between Kinmen and the nearby island of Little Kinmen. Taiwanese military leaders had also opposed the longer bridge, saying it would leave Kinmen vulnerable to a ground invasion from the mainland. All this disappointed many in Kinmen.
Feelings here have been more mixed about a proposal to build casinos to draw the kinds of revenues that mainland tourism brings to the gambling haven of Macao, given the social ills that might spring up. In Macao, for instance, prostitution is rampant. (Brothels would not be a new phenomenon on this island, though — they were commonplace here when the Kuomintang military presence was at its peak.)
In 2000, Taiwanese officials approved a policy of establishing the “little three links” to Fujian Province from Kinmen and the island of Matsu. The links amounted to a limited opening up of trade, transportation and postal services. Tours from the mainland first arrived by ferry here in 2001, and for years Kinmen was the only taste of Taiwan available to many Chinese. When direct commercial flights between major Chinese and Taiwanese cities began in 2008, mainlander visits to Kinmen dropped. One tour guide, Wu Meiying, 37, said only about a third of the tourists now are from China; the rest are mostly Taiwanese.
Wu Tseng-dong has profited handsomely from tourism by operating stores that sell knives and cleavers made from old artillery shells (each yields about 60 blades). He said Kinmen can only thrive if relations with the mainland continue to warm. “All right, all right, we fought, we bombed each other to hell, we made knives,” he said. “Let’s get over it.”
And yet, memories of conflict here remain deeply etched. Yang Xihui, 58, who works as a janitor at a building with a tourist entrance into the defence tunnels, can recall the air-raid siren’s going off on Aug. 23, 1958. She said she sprinted with her family to the underground shelter. They lived there for more than 40 days, emerging only during occasional breaks in the shelling to collect sweet potatoes or roots and to empty chamber pots.
“I was too young to be afraid then,” she said. “I thought it was a game.”
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Once a Redoubt Against China, Taiwan’s Outpost Evolves
By EDWARD WONG and XIYUN YANG
16 September 2011
KINMEN, Taiwan — Burrowing just a few feet beneath the surface of this island in the Taiwan Strait turns up remnants of what was once the most militarized zone on earth.
Concrete tunnels that once served as air-raid shelters run beneath villages like a network of capillaries. The threat from Mao and the People’s Republic of China began in 1949, when Communist soldiers trying to invade Taiwan made an ill-fated beach landing on this island, a few miles off the southeast coast of the mainland. Five years later, Chinese forces shelled the island for months, prompting the United States to contemplate using nuclear weapons against China. But even that attack did not prepare the island’s residents and Taiwanese soldiers for the artillery barrage that came in 1958: a half-million shells over 44 days that killed hundreds. The Communists then switched strategies: for the next two decades, the shells they lobbed every other day were loaded with propaganda leaflets.
Thus has this windswept island occupied a unique position in the precarious relationship between China and Taiwan, which has de facto independence but is considered a rebel province by the Communists.
Since 2008, as relations between Taiwan and China have warmed, Kinmen, once called Quemoy in the West, has stood as a test case for how some Taiwanese are calibrating their growing dependence on economic ties with China. The people of Kinmen consider themselves culturally closer to the nearby mainland province of Fujian than to Taiwan, and are debating how much to welcome mainlanders’ money and influence. Among the issues at play are whether to build a bridge to the Fujianese city of Xiamen; open a casino for mainland tourists; and adjust portrayals of anti-Communist military battles at tourist sites in language more palatable to the visitors. In July, mainland tourists, once restricted to coming only on tour groups, began arriving independently by ferry from Xiamen.
But to some, there remains a line that should not be crossed.
“Kinmen and Taiwan will grow closer to China to make money off of it, but they will never reunite with China,” said Chen Yi-liang, who was stationed here in the army for two decades and now lives near the coast.
In that sense, Kinmen is a mirror of the hopes and anxieties across much of Asia during China’s resurgence.
The island has a population of 100,000. It has farmland and deserted stretches of beach and even a smattering of European-style villas. Those were built by residents of Kinmen who worked or lived in parts of Southeast Asia starting in the Qing dynasty and were struck by the colonial architecture. (Emigrants from Guangdong Province, in southern China, also built the same kinds of villas in their hometowns.)
Kinmen was a naval garrison during the Qing, but under the Kuomintang, who fled to Taiwan after losing a civil war to the Communists, it became a fortress. When Mr. Chen arrived a few decades ago, there were about 80,000 soldiers on the island, a fifth less than at the height of tensions in the 1950s. Tsai Cheng-wang, a professor at National Quemoy University, estimates that 10 million Taiwanese have participated in military service on Kinmen.
“It is a bitter experience for all Taiwanese men, but it’s something we will always remember,” he said. “I don’t think these memories are going anywhere anytime soon.”
Famously, Justin Yifu Lin, the chief economist of the World Bank, defected at age 26 to the mainland from his military post here supposedly by swimming to Xiamen. There is still an outstanding warrant for his arrest in Taiwan.
The number of soldiers on Kinmen has dropped to just several thousand. They wander the island in their green uniforms, sometimes brushing shoulders with mainland tourists at the sites that commemorate Kuomintang stands against the Communists. Some of the civil defense tunnels have been renovated for tourism. On the northwest coast, there is a preserved concrete gun emplacement outside a military museum, which praises the Kuomintang victory in the 1949 Battle of Guningtou. A centerpiece is the jeep in which Chiang Kai-shek supposedly rode when he reviewed troops after the expulsion of the Communist invaders.
Mainlanders are officially barred from the military memorials, but many sneak glimpses. A debate started up among museum administrators a few years ago over whether to change some of the wording on the displays to make them less insulting to mainlanders, even though the mainlanders want to see the original Taiwanese version. Eventually, signs that labeled the Communist army as “gongfei,” or Communist bandits, were altered to refer instead to the People’s Liberation Army.
“On Kinmen, for 50 years in their self-presentation and propaganda, they’ve been a bulwark against P.R.C. expansionism, and now they have to find a way to welcome it and leverage it and generate benefits from it,” said Michael Szonyi, a professor of Chinese history at Harvard who wrote about Kinmen in “Cold War Island.” “The people on Kinmen have to very quickly adjust to the conversion of their former enemy into their economic lifeline.”
The island’s residents have always tried to exploit their unique position, he said. At times, they have emphasized the sacrifices they made during wartime in order to get more compensation from the Taiwanese government. At others, they have played down the history of conflict with China in order to highlight their position as a laboratory for closer relations.
Local politicians strongly supported a proposal by some officials in Taipei to build a bridge between Xiamen and Kinmen. But a study started in 2008 by the government of President Ma Ying-jeou, the Kuomintang member who supports reconciliation with China, determined that it would be too costly. A smaller bridge was ordered built between Kinmen and the nearby island of Little Kinmen. Taiwanese military leaders had also opposed the longer bridge, saying it would leave Kinmen vulnerable to a ground invasion from the mainland. All this disappointed many in Kinmen.
Feelings here have been more mixed about a proposal to build casinos to draw the kinds of revenues that mainland tourism brings to the gambling haven of Macao, given the social ills that might spring up. In Macao, for instance, prostitution is rampant. (Brothels would not be a new phenomenon on this island, though — they were commonplace here when the Kuomintang military presence was at its peak.)
In 2000, Taiwanese officials approved a policy of establishing the “little three links” to Fujian Province from Kinmen and the island of Matsu. The links amounted to a limited opening up of trade, transportation and postal services. Tours from the mainland first arrived by ferry here in 2001, and for years Kinmen was the only taste of Taiwan available to many Chinese. When direct commercial flights between major Chinese and Taiwanese cities began in 2008, mainlander visits to Kinmen dropped. One tour guide, Wu Meiying, 37, said only about a third of the tourists now are from China; the rest are mostly Taiwanese.
Wu Tseng-dong has profited handsomely from tourism by operating stores that sell knives and cleavers made from old artillery shells (each yields about 60 blades). He said Kinmen can only thrive if relations with the mainland continue to warm. “All right, all right, we fought, we bombed each other to hell, we made knives,” he said. “Let’s get over it.”
And yet, memories of conflict here remain deeply etched. Yang Xihui, 58, who works as a janitor at a building with a tourist entrance into the defence tunnels, can recall the air-raid siren’s going off on Aug. 23, 1958. She said she sprinted with her family to the underground shelter. They lived there for more than 40 days, emerging only during occasional breaks in the shelling to collect sweet potatoes or roots and to empty chamber pots.
“I was too young to be afraid then,” she said. “I thought it was a game.”
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