Tensions high in the waters off Taiwan islands visible from China’s shore.

Boat tours around Kinmen are still operating, though under a closer watch by Taiwan’s coast guard. Officers visit each boat before they set sail and warn captains not to stray into Chinese waters.

But for most residents in Kinmen, which for decades had been a military frontline for Chinese aggression, it’s life as usual.

It’s low season for tourists. Residents go about their business on quiet streets shrouded in fog and rain. In the late afternoon, teenagers stream out of a high school, which has reopened after the Lunar New Year break.

“We don’t feel nervous at all. This is none of our business. It’s just Taiwan and mainland China having a fight,” said Hung Ho-cheng, a retired businessman, summing up the kind of nonchalance that is commonplace on an island that has long been a geopolitical flashpoint.

“In the past, whenever a mainland ship crossed the median line (into Taiwan’s waters), our cannons would fire toward it without warning,” Hung said. “That was the environment we grew up in.”

The shots, he added, would land in waters in front of the Chinese ships to drive them away.

At the turn of the century, when tensions eased and relations between Beijing and Taipei briefly blossomed, both sides saw Kinmen as a potential conduit for peaceful exchange. In 2001, a ferry service was launched between Kinmen and Xiamen, the closest city on the Chinese coast.

“The political significance is high, which is a form of a declaration of sovereignty,” said Kuan Bi-ling, head of Taiwan’s Ocean Affairs Council.

Last week, Chinese coast guard officers boarded a Taiwanese tour boat for inspection, an unprecedented move that startled passengers on board.

“It’s super scary,” a passenger said in a widely circulated video upon returning to Kinmen under the escort of a Taiwanese coast guard ship. “(I was) so afraid that I wouldn’t be able to come back to Taiwan.”

Kuan, the minister, said the incident triggered “panic” among Taiwanese people.

But for most residents in Kinmen, which for decades had been a military frontline for Chinese aggression, it’s life as usual.

It’s low season for tourists. Residents go about their business on quiet streets shrouded in fog and rain. In the late afternoon, teenagers stream out of a high school, which has reopened after the Lunar New Year break.

“We don’t feel nervous at all. This is none of our business. It’s just Taiwan and mainland China having a fight,” said Hung Ho-cheng, a retired businessman, summing up the kind of nonchalance that is commonplace on an island that has long been a geopolitical flashpoint.

Standing next to an overgrown military bunker, Hung said he had grown used to living with the remnants of war, fought between Mao Zedong’s Communist regime and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government which fled to Taiwan from mainland China in 1949.

For much of the Cold War, Kinmen was the site of ferocious attacks by Mao’s Communist forces, which tried to seize control of the islands with multiple amphibious assaults and repeated shelling. By the time the bombardment faded in the late 1970s, an estimated 1 mmillion artillery shells had struck Kinmen, which covers an area roughly the same size as New York’s Staten Island.

People also ask

 

 

What is the small island between China and Taiwan?

 

 

 

Kinmen, alternatively known as Quemoy, is a group of islands governed as a county by the Republic of China (Taiwan), only 10 km (6.2 mi) east from the city of Xiamen in Fujian, located at the southeastern coast of the People’s Republic of China, from which they are separated by Xiamen Bay.

 

roughly 100 miles

 

Taiwan, island in the western Pacific Ocean that lies roughly 100 miles (160 km) off the coast of southeastern China. It is approximately 245 miles (395 km) long (north-south) and 90 miles (145 km) across at its widest point

What ocean surrounds Taiwan?

 

 

Taiwan borders the Pacific Ocean to the east, the East China Sea to the north, and the South China Sea to the southeast

Why is Taiwan called Ghost island?

 

 

During the Japanese occupation period, Taiwan was named by its colonizers as a “ghost island” due to its severe epidemic problems like malaria and cholera. This spectral label on Taiwan directly points to the political divide between the colonizers and the colonized in a symbolic ligh

China announced on Sunday that its coast guard would begin regular patrols and set up law enforcement activity around the Kinmen islands, following the death of two Chinese nationals fleeing Taiwan’s coast guard having entered into restricted waters too close to Kinmen.

Six Chinese coast guard officers on Monday boarded a Taiwanese tourist boat carrying 11 crew and 23 passengers to check its route plan, certificate and crew licences, leaving around half an hour later, Taiwan’s coast guard said.

China’s military has over the past four years regularly sent warplanes and warships into the skies and seas around Taiwan as it seeks to assert Beijing’s sovereignty claims, and has continued to do so following last month’s election.

A senior Taiwan security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters they believed Beijing seized on the Kinmen incident with the deaths of the two Chinese nationals as an “excuse” to further pile pressure on Lai, but did not want to turn it into an “international incident”.

China was likely to continue increasing pressure on Taiwan ahead of Lai’s May 20 inauguration, the official said.

Recent Chinese pressure has seen Taiwan losing one of its few remaining diplomatic allies, the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru, to China and a change in a flight path in the Taiwan Strait.

Chinese state media said Quanzhou Red Cross officials, accompanied by family members, arrived on Kinmen on Tuesday to bring home the two survivors from the boat which overturned when it tried to out-run Taiwan’s coast guard last week.

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A spokesperson for the Chinese coast guard said Sunday that its Fujian division will regularly monitor the waters off the southern coast of the city of Xiamen a few kilometers from Kinmen to strengthen maritime law enforcement.

Fishermen from both Taiwan and China regularly sail that stretch of water, which has seen a rise in tensions as the number of Chinese vessels including sand dredgers and fishing boats have notably increased in the area.

Kinmen residents have complained of both the noise and sound pollution from the vessels, as well as losses to their livelihood in fishing.