A visit to Kinmen, where the PRC meets the ROC

A few weeks ago I visited the island of Kinmen, off the coast of Fujian, in Southern China. For decades this unassuming little island was one of the front lines in the Cold War, and it still lies on the edge between two political entities that don't recognize each other's legitimacy.

The question of who governs Kinmen gives rise to one of the world's strangest cases of political semantics. The governments of the People's Republic of China and of the Republic of China agree on very little, but they both concur that this small island is part of Fujian province, China. The only thing is that both governments officially consider themselves to be the rightful representatives of the whole of China, Fujian included, so this doesn't tell you much about who actually governs the island.

In practice, Kinmen has been governed from Taipei since the KMT retreated to Taiwan in the late nineteen forties. The island is, however, far closer to the Mainland of China than it is to Taiwan. In fact, it is literally in swimming distance from the the city of Xiamen, whose high-rises are clearly visible from the island's Western shore. This sleepy place was at the centre of two "Taiwan straits crises" in the fifties, which almost led China and the US into open conflict with each other. Kinmen was fired upon regularly from the Mainland up until the seventies, and its inhabitants lived under martial law, unable even to go to Taiwan with any ease. Nowadays open hostilities have ended, and life on the island is more or less "normal" in spite of the ongoing military presence. The fact that Kinmen is still ruled by Taiwan seems almost surreal, given how incredibly close it is to a powerful and revanchist China.

I visited Kinmen during the week-long vacation for China's National Day. It is a nice place to spend a few days, with lots of sites related to its recent history, well preserved architecture and traditions, and some nature thrown in. The island is reachable by ferry from the cities of Xiamen and Quanzhou, on the Mainland. These ferry rides started up when the so-called "three small links" were introduced in 2001, allowing trade, postal and transportation links to be set up between Mainland China and the two little Taiwan-controlled islands of Kinmen and Matsu. For a while these were the only direct points of contact between the PRC and the ROC, until the same three links were established between the PRC and Taiwan proper in 2008.

I decided to get to Kinmen by first flying down to Xiamen from Beijing, and then taking the 20 minute ferry ride to island. Flights to Xiamen cost one thirds of flights to Taipei, in spite of the distance from Beijing being basically the same. This route gave me the opportunity to spend a day in Xiamen, which I had never been to before. If you mention Xiamen to people in China you will be told that it is a pleasant city, with a relaxed lifestyle, clement weather and nice views of the ocean, and I found this to be more or less true. As Chinese cities go, Xiamen is definitely one of the more pleasant ones. I spent the night in a nice hostel located in the city centre, which is made up of winding alleyways dotted with cafes and shops, rather than the straight, alienating boulevards that make up the centre of most Chinese cities. What's more, while the city feels relaxed and the sea brings a nice breeze and good views, Xiamen still maintains a certain big-city vibe and urban energy.

Xiamen's impressive Shimao Twin Towers as seen from my taxi window

I also visited Gulangyu, a little island of the coast of Xiamen which is the city's main tourist attraction. When Xiamen was turned into a "treaty port" after the fist opium war, Gulangyu became its "international settlement", peopled mostly by Europeans and policed by Sikh policemen brought over from British India. For this reason it is still filled with Victorian-era buildings. It also has a long association with Western classical music, and is known as the "piano island". It has a piano museum, and some of China's most famous classical musicians were born on the island, even though it has few residents.

The island is now a UNESCO world heritage site, and entirely car-free. It is reached by a five-minute ferry ride from Xiamen. When I got to the pier and asked for a ticket, I was amazed to be asked for my passport, which I had not thought to bring with me. Luckily my Chinese social insurance card was accepted as photo ID, and I was still able to buy a ticket. As I scanned my ticket to get on to the ferry, a photo of my face was taken by the scanning machine (which may well be equipped with facial recognition technology). Levels of monitoring of people's movement are getting more and more insane.

Not having arrived in China yesterday I kept my expectations low, knowing that on the evening before the National Day a site so famous would be completely packed with tourists from the provinces, and I was proven correct. I will admit that I did not explore the island too much, since it was already evening, but the roads I walked down reminded me of Beijing's Nanluoguxiang, the centre of Lijiang, and every other tourist trap in China: the same shops, the same souvenirs, the same kitsch, overcrowding and commercialisation. Unfortunately this seems to be the destiny of most tourist sites in the country, even the ones like Gulangyu that must have originally had much real charm.

The next day I took the ferry to Kinmen, which leaves from a special pier near the airport. I passed through PRC customs before getting on, and then ROC customs once on the island. All the other passengers on the ferry seemed to be Mainlanders taking a trip for the holidays. Although Kinmen is far from being famous throughout China, people from Fujian do go there on weekend trips. Mainland Chinese are in fact able to go to Kinmen much more easily than to Taiwan itself. They can go independently and buy a travel permit on arrival, whereas for Taiwan proper they have to apply for a permit in advance, and can only go in an organized group unless their hukou is based in one of China's main cities. The number of Mainlanders visiting Taiwan has dropped after the election of Tsai Ying-Wen and the deterioration in cross-straits relations, but apparently the number of visitors to Kinmen has continued growing, although fewer of them fly onwards to Taipei.

Kinmen is hardly huge, but it's not tiny either. It has about 130,000 people living on it, and it would take a couple of hours to drive around it. I stayed in an airbnb in a rural settlement a few bus stops away from the island's main town, Jincheng. That afternoon I took the bus into town, and found a shop where I could buy a Taiwanese SIM card (my Mainland Chinese SIM card worked on international roaming, but as well as being far more expensive the service also made it impossible to visit websites that the Chinese government blocks. So for instance I could not use Google maps). After that I strolled around Jincheng. The town is a pleasant, laid back place, with a network of little lanes full of shops and restaurants. Although Kinmen still isn't Taiwan, the atmosphere is unmistakably that of a place ruled by Taiwan rather than by Beijing, right down to the 7-11s on every corner and the scooters parked on every pavement. While I wouldn't say it exactly feels more prosperous than the Mainland, everything somehow seems a bit more humane and easy going.

What made it especially clear that I was not in the Mainland were the big campaign posters for the candidates in the local elections, and the little temples that dotted the streets. Not that temples don't exist in Mainland Chinese cities, but they are not integrated into local life in the same way, and you don't usually see locals going there regularly. Jincheng also has a few interesting historic sights, including the Wu River Academy, originally built in 1780 as an academy of classical Chinese learning, and the surviving Qing government headquarters, all of which I visited.

Xiamen, PRC as seen at night from Kinmen, ROC

The Guomindang headquarters in Jincheng

Kinmen (or Quemoy, as Westerners used to call it) has been populated since the Tang dynasty, and for most of history it was a sleepy place, although not a totally unimportant one. Famous Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhuxi (1130-1200) even founded an academy on the island. It suffered from pirate attacks throughout history, in fact the name Kinmen (金门) or "golden gates" refers to the gates that were raised to defend the island from pirates. Koxinga, the famous Ming loyalist who expelled the Dutch from Taiwan and turned it into a base from which to resist the Qing and restore the Ming, also expelled the Dutch from the Kinmen, as well as chopping down all of the island's trees to build his navy. Still, Kinmen would have remained pretty anonymous if it hadn't been for the Chinese civil war in the forties. In the battle of Guningtou, in 1949, roughly 20,000 Communist troops were unable to take the island from the hands of 40,000 Nationalist ones, meaning that it was fated to become the last little outpost of Nationalist China.

After the Second Taiwan Straits Crisis in 1958, the two sides agreed to a bizarre "odd-day ceasefire". For the next two decades, the island was only shelled on even days (in the beginning the shelling also went in the other direction, but eventually it became a one-way affair). As well as shells, a constant barrage of propaganda leaflets was shot both ways. Until the nineties, the island was treated by Taipei as a special military zone, and travel to and from it was restricted. This led to the tragic Lieyu Massacre in 1987, when a boatload of Vietnamese refugees arriving on Kinmen to ask asylum were shot in cold blood by ROC soldiers under orders to execute anyone who landed on the island without permission, after which the government unsuccessfully tried to cover things up. In 1992 martial law was finally lifted, five years after it was in Taiwan.

The islanders' sense of identity is an unusual one. They don't see themselves as Taiwanese and don't share much of Taiwan's history, including the 50 years of Japanese colonialism that did much to shape the bigger island's identity. They are culturally very much Fujianese, and their dialect is Hokkien spoken with a Quanzhou accent (although it is still intelligible with Taiwanese Hokkien). As such the recent surge in Taiwanese identity holds little interest to them, but they generally identify with the Republic of China, while fearing that if Taiwan gave up on that charade and became de-jure independent it might lose interest in them and abandon them to the PRC, a result which most islanders unsurprisingly do not want to see. Due to these circumstances, the Kinmense vote for the Guomindang in national elections almost to a man and woman, and steer clear of the DPP.

On my second day on the island I went back into town with the intention of renting a scooter, which is by far the best way of getting around. Renting one was hard, since Mainlanders who'd come over for the holidays had already rented almost everything available, but in the end I found a place with an electric scooter left. Once motorized I headed south, to a village called Shuitou. The island's rural scenery looked pretty and green, but not exactly untouched. Unlike Taiwan's other "outer islands", Kinmen is quite well populated and mostly flat, and there are houses and new developments almost everywhere, much of them pretty unsightly and utilitarian.

All the same, Kinmen also has some of the best preserved old buildings in the country, perhaps due to life being frozen under martial law for decades. The village of Shuitou is known to have the island's best traditional architecture, and it did not disappoint. At its centre stand some impressive villas built in the late 19th century by locals who came back from the Dutch Indies after making their fortunes. The villas mix Chinese and European colonial architecture, and have now become museums. The most famous one is the Deyue mansion, featuring an impressive watchtower that was used against pirates. Next to it are rows of authentic traditional Fujianese houses from the 19th century, with local families happily living inside them. Seeing people living in houses more than a century old might be the norm in parts of Europe, but not so much in the Chinese-speaking world. Many of the houses have the long swallowtail roofs that are a feature of Fujianese architecture. These are normally only found on temples and ancestral halls due to their showy nature, but this was once a wealthy place. Over the last few centuries the Fujianese have been those who emigrated abroad in the highest numbers out of all the Chinese, especially to South-East Asia, and some of the resulting wealth made its way to this island.

After leaving Shuitou, I drove across the island and reached Mt. Taiwu, the island's highest peak, which reaches 262 mts. above sea level. I was able to go halfway up the mountain on my scooter, at which point I reached a shrine dedicated to the ROC soldiers who died defending Kinmen from the PRC, and a military cemetery with rows upon rows of soldiers' graves. Next to the cemetery was a modern military base, and I saw young men in uniform jogging, probably Taiwanese youngsters doing their two-year military service. After that point you could only continue on foot, and I walked up the rest of the way to the top of the mountain. Although there were few people around, I met the odd visitors from both the Mainland and Taiwan. The nature was gorgeous and untouched. In the trees next to the path there were webs with huge yellow and black spiders sitting in the middle, with thin and elongated bodies and leg-spans about the size of a dinner plate.

Once I got to the peak of the mountain, I could see most of the island around me. I could also see the Mainland's coast extremely clearly across the sea, so close I could have made out the buildings if the weather had been clearer. I asked myself how China's government, with its vast territorial claims that it is aggressively pursuing elsewhere, can let this state of affairs persist. Then I reminded myself that Kinmen is crawling with Taiwanese soldiers, and not for nothing. Doubtless China could now take the island back in a fight if it wanted, but this would involve serious fighting and numerous casualties on both sides, and it would mean the beginning of a real war. As long as a war doesn't start, Kinmen will thus remain under Taiwanese rule. If one day hostilities do break out however, I can't see it standing much of a chance.

A large spider with black and yellow stripes in the middle of its web

The view from the top of Mt. Taiwu, with the mountains of Fujian visible across the sea.

After leaving the mountain, I drove my scooter to the August 23 Artillery War Museum, which documents the battle that started on that date in 1958, when the PRC launched a heavy artillery attack against Kinmen. The subsequent hostilities (known as the "second Taiwan straits crisis") lasted for weeks, and included air-to-air combat between the two sides. Hundreds of ROC soldiers and possibly a few thousand of the island's civilians were killed, as well as a few hundred soldiers and civilians on the other side. The PRC was eventually deterred by the direct intervention of the United States. The museum was small but informative enough. Outside it stood a Taiwanese tank and another big military vehicle from that era. What was most surprising was that the museum's cafe' sold "Mao Zedong milk tea", and the wall displayed a large poster advertising Mao's milk tea and "Chiang Kai Shek's special blend coffee", with pictures of the two leaders' faces. It seems rather incredible that the Chairman's image would be made use of so lightly in Kinmen of all places, but there you go.

Mao Zedong milk tea and Chiang Kai Shek coffee on sale in the cafe' of the August 23 Artillery War Museum

A Republic of China tank outside the museum

War cemetery with the tombs of soldiers who died defending Kinmen

I got out of the museum and rode my scooter to nearby Shanwai, the island's second town. Looking for a place to eat, I wandered into a huge and very fancy five-storey shopping mall which seemed quite incongruous, in the middle of a little town of a few thousand people. I later discovered that the mall was opened in 2014 by Taiwanese company Ever Rich, in the hope of cashing in on Mainland tourism, and it boasts Asia's largest duty-free store and Kinmen's first multiplex cinema. The mall wasn't exactly empty, but it was hardly packed either, in spite of those being the peak days of the year for Chinese tourism, and I wondered how much money it can really be making. I was the only customer in the cafe' where I had a bite to eat.

That evening, back in Jincheng, I ate a bowl of the well-known local Beef Noodle Soup (牛肉麵) in a little restaurant, and then went and had a drink at the only bar in town (and probably on the island), a place named the "White Lion Pub". The bar was completely empty except for me and the girl working there, so we ended up chatting for a while. She was a local, and I asked her whether local people feel Chinese, Taiwanese or what. She replied that by now they don't really feel any of the two. "If we go to Taiwan we just say we are from Kinmen, but if we go abroad where no one has ever heard of Kinmen, then we say we are from Taiwan". It struck me that this would be the least misleading answer, while still technically inaccurate. Saying "Republic of China" would only baffle most people.

All in all, Kinmen struck me as a worthwhile place to spend a few days. It really has quite a lot of things to see, and in fact I only managed to pack in about half of the sites. For anyone who has to spend time in Xiamen it can make for a good weekend trip to see some nature, look at some old buildings, eat some good food and appreciate a few geopolitical realities.

And finally, a woman president!

So the Taiwanese people have just elected a woman president.

The only time China was ruled by a woman during its two and a half millennia of imperial rule was with empress Wu Zetian, who ruled from 690 to 705 AD. The famous (and infamous) Empress Dowager Cixi, who was the de facto ruler of China from 1867 to her death in 1908, was never officially made empress.

In modern times, none of the countries which could be termed the "Chinese cultural sphere" had ever had a woman leader until a couple of days ago. Not the PRC, not Taiwan, not even Singapore. In fact, before Park Geun-hye's election in South Korea in 2012, there hadn't been a single woman leader in any East Asian country, including Korea and Japan.

It is interesting to note that by contrast, many countries in other parts of Asia have had important women leaders, from Indira Gandhi in India and Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan to Corazon Aquino in the Philippines (the first two were of course the daughters of celebrated male heads of state). Many of these countries might come across as more sexist than China, but in this particular area they fare better. Even though in a Chinese context it is perfectly normal for women to work and quite possible for them to be respected and reach the top tiers in business, they have found it much harder to rise to the top in politics.

Taiwan has now become the first Chinese-speaking society to break the spell and choose a woman leader (although many of her followers reject the "Chinese" label altogether). Appropriately, she represents a party which was born out of a popular uprising against an authoritarian state, and which has overwhelmingly won the youth vote. These elections only confirm that, in this as in other areas, Taiwan is the most progressive society in the Chinese world.

A visit to Taiwan

This Spring Festival I finally found the chance to pay a visit to Taiwan, China's fabled "treasure island"  (宝岛) of times past. If you want to have a full perspective on China I think it pays to visit this island, 90 miles off the coast of Fujian Province, which for over six decades has offered an alternative version of Chineseness to the one found on the Mainland.

It is amazing now to think that for 22 years, from 1949 until 1971, Taiwan (or rather the "Republic of China") officially represented all of China in the United Nations Security Council. Nowadays the tables are reversed, the PRC is a great power and Taiwan is increasingly marginalized. It is officially recognized as a country by only 21 nations, most of which are small island states few have even heard of. It is forced to compete in international sporting events under the dubious name of "Chinese Taipei", and it sits right next to a huge country which officially considers it to be a renegade province awaiting reunification. What's more, its economy is almost entirely tied to that country. But in spite of all this, Taiwan continues to thrive.

While in Taiwan I visited mainly two places, the current capital Taipei and the old capital Tainan. Taipei is a slick modern city, efficient and interesting. I found I liked it quite a lot. On my first day there I visited the shopping district of Ximendi, which looked a bit like Tokyo and was buzzing with youthfulness and activity. From there I walked on to the imposing presidential palace built by the Japanese, and finally I got to the 228 Peace Park.

This historic park in the center of Taipei now commemorates the victims of the "228 massacre", the violent suppression of anti-government protests by the Guomindang on the 28th of February 1947, in which dozens of thousands were killed. For decades this event was a taboo in Taiwan, much like the events of '89 remain taboo on the Mainland today. After Taiwan democratized, however, it became alright to talk about it, and in 1998 this park was rededicated to the victims of the massacre. Next to the park there is a museum on the incident, but it was unfortunately closed when I went there.

Another place I visited in Taipei was Shilin, the most well known of Taiwan's night markets, which are famous throughout the Chinese-speaking world. These night markets (夜市 in Chinese) are open until late and are dedicated to leisurely eating, shopping and strolling, with the focus definitely on eating. Shilin was crowded, but the snacks on sale were cheap and quite delicious. I went there with a Taiwanese young man who a friend from Beijing had hooked me up with. He brought three friends along, one of whom turned out to live in Beijing as well, and was back in Taiwan for the Spring Festival. They were all extremely nice and friendly, and happy to find out I could speak Mandarin. I asked them if they felt Chinese or not, and their general answer was along the lines of "no, we feel Taiwanese". 

The other big city I visited was Tainan, down in the South. It was Taiwan's old capital during the Qing Dynasty, and it has a cultural heritage second to none. I got there by riding Taiwan's fast and efficient highs-speed railway, which took me from one side of the island to the other in an hour and a half. Tainan turned out to be quite different from Taipei. It felt less modern and developed, and the pace of life is far more laid back. Because of the heat (even in February) and the masses of scooters on the streets, I was somewhat reminded of Vietnam.

In a land of friendly people, the Southern Taiwanese are supposed to be the friendliest of all, and I found this to be true. Quite a few people struck up conversations with me around the city. Although most of the locals speak Taiwanese at home (in other words the variant of Chinese spoken in Fujian province), I found that if I spoke to them in Mandarin I could still understand and be understood. While in Taiwan I also found that getting around in a place which uses the traditional Chinese characters was actually not as hard as I envisaged. Once you have truly mastered the simplified characters, making the switch to the old form of the script is not a big step.

While in the city I went to see the temple in honour of Koxinga, the local hero who liberated Taiwan from Dutch Rule in 1661 and then spent his time resisting the Manchu who had conquered the Mainland. I found out that this hero of both Chinese and Taiwanese nationalism was actually born in Japan and had a Japanese mother. He has been deified in Taiwan, as great historical figures often have been in Chinese culture, and this temple was built in his honour.

I spent the eve of the Chinese New Year in Tainan. Around dinner time the streets filled with the happy banter of families eating their New Year Meal together in their homes. In my hostel I got to know an American who lives in Taiwan, and he took me out to the local night market. Along with us came another American and a local Taiwanese friend of his. As we walked the streets, random strangers would greet us with a 新年快乐 (happy new year). The night market turned out to be absolutely packed, but the food was as good as ever.

Another place I visited before heading back to Taipei was Meishan, a little town in the interior of Taiwan. I got there by bus from Tainan. As the bus rolled through the countryside, I had a strong feeling of being back in the Mainland. The towns and villages really didn't look too distinct from the ones you might find in Southern China.

When I got to Meishan I found the local visitors' centre, where the handful of bored middle aged women who worked there where overwhelmed with enthusiasm when they realized I could speak Chinese ("oh you live in Beijing. That's why you're Mandarin is so standard"). They gave me a map and pointed me in the direction of the local park. When I got there I found it to be quite typical of Chinese parks: there was a little hill which you could climb, at the top of which there was a little pagoda from which you could view the scenery. I climbed up to the top in the company of throngs of local families, and looked at the sub-tropical vegetation which surrounded me on all sides.

Taipei's presidential palace

The scenery at Meishan, in Taiwan's interior.

Taipei's Ximendi shopping district

Although I unfortunately didn't spend very long in Taiwan because of time constraints, I still developed some general impressions of the place.

• In the end, I would say that what made the best impression on me about Taiwan was the Taiwanese people themselves. Almost all of them are cheerful, easy-going, helpful and friendly, more than the Chinese of the Mainland, and more than anyone else in East Asia for that matter. Other than that, Taiwan seems like an easy and pleasant place to travel: it's small, the weather is nice even in winter (I never needed more than a light jumper even in Taipei), it's relatively cheap, and there are plenty of things to see and do. The only downside I encountered was that Taiwanese hostels are lousy, if my experience is anything to go by. Although staying in youth hostels is a good way to save money and get to know other travellers, if I go back to Taiwan I'm definitely staying only in hotels.   

• For those who have lived in China a while, Taiwan has a strange feel to it: it feels really familiar, but then it somehow doesn't. It's recognizably Chinese, but without many of the problems and absurdities of China proper. You could almost say that Taiwan is a sort of "China light". The streets can be chaotic, air pollution can be bad and blocks of flats can look ugly and run down, but these problems are still nowhere near as bad as in the Mainland. In general, everything just feels more relaxed and easy to manage. Put it down to a different history, a different system, or even just the fact that it is a tropical island, rather than a huge continent with a billion people jostling for elbow-space. Having said that, in many ways Taiwan feels more similar to the Mainland than Hong Kong does.

• In Taiwan popular religiosity really is far more widespread than on the Mainland. The most common forms of religious practice seem to be Chinese folk beliefs and Taoism, although Buddhism is also in evidence. As is normal in the Chinese tradition, most people happily dabble in all these belief systems at the same time. Temples are everywhere in Taiwanese cities, and they always seem to be crowded with people lighting incense and chanting (I was there during the Chinese New Year, when temple attendance is probably highest). Although it is untrue that such practices are completely dead on the Mainland, they are certainly much less widespread and harder to find, especially in the urban areas.

• Before going to Taiwan, I thought of it as an advanced "first-world" economy. When traveling there however, it felt like it was almost at the level of a first-world country, but not quite there, especially once you get out of Taipei. This feeling became even more pronounced when I traveled on to Seoul, which seems more prosperous in comparison. And indeed, if you look at GDP per capita statistics (if you believe in GDP as a good measure of such things), Taiwan is ranked about as high as Portugal or Greece, a bit lower than South Korea and considerably lower than Western Europe or Japan (but still three times higher than the PRC).

• Taiwan used to be called an "economic miracle", but from what I can see its real miracle is a political one. It is currently the only fully and properly democratic society within the Chinese cultural sphere (including Singapore). In thirty years it has transitioned from being a repressive one-party state under the Guomindang to a genuine democracy with two parties alternating in power, and all the relevant institutions. What's more those institutions were not imposed from the outside like in Hong Kong, but built up locally. And as much as some people like to argue that democracy just doesn't fit in with Chinese culture, the fact is that in Taiwan it basically works fine, in spite of the huge punch-ups which the Taiwanese parliament is famous for.

• Another thing I didn't realize before going to Taiwan is that it is an extremely overcrowded place. In fact its population density is one of the highest in the world, with 23 million people crowded into a territory only slightly larger than Switzerland. Taking the high speed train down the West Coast, which is the more heavily urbanized side of the island, all I saw was houses and human settlements all the way from Taipei to Tainan. I understand that the mountainous East Coast is less populated and has some amazing natural scenery, and I hope to be able to go there next time and enjoy it.

A parrot in a shop in a Taiwanese village

People relaxing in a natural hot spring in Beitou, Taipei