Kinmen County’s political geography is provocative in and of itself. A pair of islets running up abreast the Chinese mainland, just 20 minutes by ferry from the Chinese city of Xiamen, Kinmen remains under the Taiwanese government’s control, after China’s failed invasion attempt in 1949.
The provocative nature of Kinmen’s existence, along with the Matsu Islands off the coast of China’s Fuzhou City, has led to no shortage of outrageous takes and analyses in foreign media either fearmongering of a Chinese invasion or using these accidents of history to somehow understand Taiwan.
Every few months a foreign reporter goes to Kinmen and wanders the streets to purchase kitchen knives made from the hundreds of artillery shells that once landed on Kinmen’s shores. They speak of Kinmen as Taiwan’s “front line” against China, and use interviews with local residents as a bellwether for cross-strait relations.
Worse yet, in recent years there has been a trend of analysts with no knowledge of Kinmen or Taiwan’s history declaring that Kinmen is Taiwan’s Crimea, and that China would surely invade it as either a response to a Taiwanese provocation, or as a precursor to a full-scale invasion.
The reality is Kinmen is not indicative of any trends in Taiwanese society because it has never been part of Taiwan historically. China would never invade Kinmen and Matsu, except as part of a larger D-Day style invasion to seize Taiwan proper.
While Taiwan has a complex history involving millennia of Austronesian presence, periods of European colonization, centuries of Hokkien and Hakka settlement, tenuous attempts at Qing peripheral rule, Japanese colonization, and the arrival of the Republic of China (ROC) with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in the 1940s, producing the complex Taiwan national identity that exists today, Kinmen and Matsu experienced none of these.
These islets were integral parts of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and parts of modern China as developed under the Republican era. Their people have always identified as Chinese, reflected in their deep-blue political leanings today. These political realities manifest in the existence of “Fujian Province, ROC,” which nominally exists under the ROC government structure to separate Taiwan and these outlying islands. Indeed, the existence of these islands under ROC control has long kept alive the myth that the ROC maintains continuity as the government of “China,” rather than now simply being the constitutional vehicle which democratic Taiwan is stuck with due to China’s threats.
The islands remain under Taiwan’s control not because of their defensive value, but because China chooses not to seize them, which it very easily could. China prefers the islands remain within the ROC as a way of keeping Taiwan linked through the ROC to the so-called “mainland,” along with their die-hard loyal KMT voters. Rather than presenting China with obstacles, they merely present China with numerous opportunities to attempt Trojan horse infiltrations into Taiwan.
Even now, a bill favored by pro-China elements in the legislature attempts to redefine the Taiwan Strait as “domestic waters.” Such a bill would give China a legal framework to block freedom of navigation patrols by foreign navies through the Strait.
Foreign analysts often seek publicity by declaring China would seize Kinmen or Matsu to intimidate Taiwan into surrendering. Not only would such a move likely be welcomed by Taiwan’s deep-green independence advocates, it would be militarily self-defeating. Such a brazen move would mobilize Taiwan and its allies to prepare for war, while also freeing Taiwan of the burden of defending indefensible Kinmen. China would gain no strategic edge by controlling them, while only hardening Taiwanese opinion against its show of force, and possibly even provoke Taiwan into declaring a Republic of Taiwan.
Mao Zedong (毛澤東) understood this well and articulated the Chinese position in a 1960 interview with American journalist Edgar Snow: “we will let Chiang Kai-shek [蔣介石] keep holding these two islands. We don’t cut off their supplies. If their supplies are insufficient, we can even give them assistance. What we want is the entire Taiwan region, which is Taiwan, the Penghu Islands, and it includes Kinmen and Matsu. This is all Chinese territory.”
If the outside world seeks to understand Taiwan, the answers are not to be found in Kinmen and Matsu, but in Chiayi City and Banciao (板橋), Magong (馬公) and Suao (蘇澳), Miaoli and Zuoying (左營), Pingtung and Nantou. Taiwan is not a big country, and there is no excuse for lazy fixations on Kinmen.
Sasha B. Chhabra is a visiting fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei.
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