About 1,100 swimmers from Taiwan, the frontline island of Kinmen and China took part yesterday in a swim meet in Liaolo Bay, a site made famous in a 1958 battle against the Chinese communists. To promote tourism and develop its seaside resources, the Kinmen County Government chose Liaolo Bay as the site for the Aug. 1 "Liaolo Bay Swim."
During relentless shelling by Chinese forces during the 1958 battle, Taiwan had to use the remote Liaolo Bay on the southern shore of Kinmen to land supplies to the troops stationed on the island stronghold.
Yesterday's swim meet was the second of its kind since the Kinmen authorities sponsored the first one on July 27, 2003, when 1,200 people took part in the meet designed to help promote tourism and lure tourists to the island after outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) earlier that year.
It was also the first time that swimmers from China participated in the swim meet -- a total of 62 people from Fujian Province swam in the cross-bay 3,000m swim. The 62 Chinese swimmers, consisting of 33 students from a physical education school in Xiamen and 29 others organized by a Fujian tourism group, arrived on Kinmen yesterday by ferry from Xiamen.
They were greeted at the Shuitou Harbor by Lee Chu-feng (
He said that he hopes one day swimmers from Taiwan and China can join together in a cross-channel swim. Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
The sponsors envisage making the Kinmen swim meet one of Taiwan's major swimming events, following the renowned Sun Moon Lake Swim, the Kaohsiung Hsitzuwan Swim and the Penghu Cross-Sea Swim.
On Aug. 23, 1958, communist Chinese troops began to shell Kinmen. In the first 36 hours, the island was battered by 94,000 artillery rounds. Over the following 42 days, some 400,000 additional shells rained down, which is only 131km2 in area.
The communist attack was repulsed 44 days later and the situation in the Taiwan Strait became more stable after the battle.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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