In a deep tunnel driven into a granite hillside, a group of soldiers crouch around a heavy field gun. They are in a fortified emplacement on the island of Greater Kinmen, two miles off the Chinese coastal province of Fujian, and their attention seems fixed on a target that lies just across the narrow stretch of calm blue sea. A little below the gun emplacement a row of rusting tanks sits on a heavily fortified beach.
The guns in the tunnel are real, if antique. The crouching soldiers are life-sized fibreglass dummies, installed both to please tourists and to commemorate the several episodes, between 1949 and 1978, when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan exchanged live fire on and from Kinmen. In more recent years, life here has been peaceful—but tensions are now rising again in the long-running standoff between Beijing and Taiwan.
Taiwan, for four decades a lively democracy, regards itself as a de facto independent country whose 23m citizens have no desire to move closer to the PRC than geography dictates. Beijing regards Taiwan as a renegade province to be recovered, by force if necessary. For more than 70 years, Taiwan’s security has been underpinned by the United States, but with Donald Trump’s return many certainties are fading. And the contest over Taiwan’s economic and political future is once again focusing on the frontline islands of Kinmen’s small archipelago.
Lush, green and shaped like a butterfly, the islands of Greater Kinmen and Lesser Kinmen are a one hour flight from Taiwan’s capital, Taipei. Home to 60,000 Taiwanese citizens, they may belong to Taiwan but on a bright day the skyscrapers of the city of Xiamen are clearly visible.
The islands’ frontline status was established in 1949, when the Kuomintang (KMT) government that had been in power in China lost the civil war and fled to Taiwan to escape the advancing Communist forces. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) attempted to capture the island in October 1949 and then again in July 1950. The KMT repelled it on both occasions.
The KMT’s leader, Chiang Kai-shek, saw Kinmen as the launchpad for his dream of retaking the mainland and returning to power in Beijing. He had tunnels dug on the islands and even launched small attacks from them against the Chinese coast in the early 1950s. In 1955, during the first Taiwan Strait crisis, China bombarded Kinmen and the islands of Matsu and Tachen, killing around 500 people. In 1958, after China again bombarded Kinmen with half a million artillery shells over 44 days and attempted to prevent the re-supply of Taiwan’s island garrisons, the US intervened directly in the conflict. As tensions gradually eased, China and Taiwan came to a pragmatic arrangement in which, for the next 20 years, they shelled each other’s garrisons on alternate days.
Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 opened a new chapter in US-China relations. Beijing’s shelling of Kinmen slackened off, finally stopping in 1978. Taiwan continued to station troops on Kinmen until 2023, when security was handed over to the police and coastguard. Then, in an unprecedented development in the spring of 2024, the Biden administration quietly deployed US special forces to Kinmen, in order to train elite Taiwanese troops for a possible Chinese invasion.
A few miles from the fibreglass gun crew, at the mouth of another deep tunnel, a group of uniformed men and women load and fire a large artillery gun. They create an impressive bang, but they are no more authentic than their fibreglass colleagues: the soldiers are actors, rehearsing the grim daily reality of those historic bombardments for the amusement of an audience of tourists.
The battles for Kinmen are commemorated in a museum within a national park that boasts a wealth of bird life, a collection of rusting tanks and fencing built out of recycled artillery shells. The gift shop stocks an unusual mix of bird photographs and mock-military camouflage clothing.
The island is riddled with defensive tunnels, some of which are now unused, while one of the larger networks serves as a tourist attraction and hosts an annual two-day music festival. At sea level, four large boat tunnels testify to Chiang’s long-held ambition to retake the mainland. In public at least, he never abandoned his claim to be the legitimate president of China and continued to assert that he would one day drive out the communist “bandits”.
The “bandits,” in turn, have never abandoned the ambition to “recover” Taiwan, though different leaders have offered different time frames: Mao Zedong suggested 100 years; Deng Xiaoping thought it best to leave it to “wiser generations”. Neither seemed to regard it as urgent. Xi Jinping, however, appears to be in more of a hurry, hinting at a deadline of 2049, the centenary of the founding of the PRC.
Increasingly aggressive activity in the waters around Kinmen serves as a reminder of the vast disparity in military strength between Taiwan and China, and of China’s capacity to transform the geopolitics of the region, as it has in the South China Sea, through relentless activity that lies just below the threshold of war.
Because of Kinmen’s proximity to the mainland, since 2009 Taiwan has not claimed territorial waters around the islands. Instead, it claims the right to enforce control in concentric maritime boundaries of “prohibited” and “restricted” waters around the islands. Before 2024, Beijing had respected Taiwanese jurisdiction, but last year Chinese coastguard vessels repeatedly violated Taiwanese waters, claiming the right to conduct “law enforcement” patrols and demonstrating that they could enter and leave at will. Chinese unlicensed fishing vessels now frequently intrude into Kinmen’s waters and Chinese coastguard vessels interfere with Taiwanese fishers. In February 2024, two Chinese fishermen died when their boat capsized after they resisted inspection in Kinmen waters by the Taiwanese coastguard. Since that incident, Chinese air and sea incursions around the main island and around Kinmen have become more frequent and aggressive.
An attempt to take Taiwan by force would risk plunging the region into war and a potential conflict with the US. Taiwan has a critical role in advanced semiconductor manufacturing, and a Chinese attack on Taiwan’s main island would trigger a global reaction. However, Kinmen, along with other hard-to-defend islands, was not included in the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty (effective from 1955 until 1980) or the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. They were thought too close to China and too complicated to defend, despite Chiang’s insistence otherwise.
Donald Trump has also accused democratic Taiwan, falsely, of stealing American chip technology and has demanded that Taiwan, which buys billions of dollars of US arms for its own defence, effectively pay protection money to Washington. If Xi wanted to test Trump’s commitment to the defence of Taiwan, the offshore islands of Kinmen could be tempting. After all, who would react, apart from the government of Taiwan, if China were to take Kinmen?
The people of Kinmen, living in the long shadow of active hostilities, have reached their own accommodation with the mainland. The islands overlap in culture and language with groups across the strait. Kinmen overwhelmingly votes KMT, the party that is more friendly to the mainland, rather than Taiwan’s native political party, the Democratic People’s Party (DPP). Marriages between the mainland and the islands are not uncommon.
In the relatively peaceful years of the Noughties, Kinmen’s citizens could commute to jobs in China by a half-hour ferry service inaugurated in 2001, and up to 250,000 mainland tourists visited the island every year. Since 2009, an annual swimming relay has taken place between Kinmen and the mainland; last year 200 people participated and the fastest completed the crossing in 88 minutes and eight seconds. Before the Covid pandemic, nearly half a million Taiwanese were living and working in mainland China. Some 250,000 still do. But while Kinmen’s citizens continue to use the ferry for shopping and business trips to the mainland, visitors from China were for a time not permitted to land. And islanders are wary of Xi’s declared ambition to bring Taiwan under Beijing’s control.
The arguments that define Taiwanese domestic politics—about how to defend Taiwan’s interests and preserve peace—are acted out in Kinmen, with different factions competing for favour. China argues that closer ties would bring great benefits. Influence peddling and soft propaganda amplify the message, and undermine faith in Taiwan’s politics and its democratic government.
In 2022, Hou Yu-ih, the KMT presidential hopeful and mayor of New Taipei, flew to Kinmen with a six point peace plan. Building on an earlier agreement that saw a water pipeline built from Fujian Province in the PRC to Kinmen, it proposed the incorporation of Kinmen into a cross-strait economic pilot zone, the importation of electricity and gas from the mainland, the restoration of direct flights suspended during Covid, and a referendum on a divisive proposal to build a bridge to the mainland. Proponents of the bridge argued it would offer convenience and prosperity. Opponents saw dependency and risk.
Hou didn’t win the election, so the bridge referendum never happened. But the following year China’s Taiwan Affairs Office proposed a similar plan, including the creation of a special economic zone that would include Xiamen and Kinmen, and a bridge from Kinmen to a new offshore airport in Xiamen.
In November 2023, perhaps prematurely, a Chinese official said that construction on the Xiamen side of the bridge had begun. From Kinmen’s northern coast, citizens can now see the cranes constructing a massive offshore airport to serve Xiamen’s five million people. The timing of Beijing’s proposal ensured that it would become a contentious focus in Taiwan’s presidential contest last year. Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council called it “a Trojan horse carrying tremendous national security risks”.
William Lai, the successful DPP candidate in those elections and now Taiwan’s president, marked the anniversary of the cross-straits crisis by remembering the price Kinmen had paid repelling Chinese attacks, rather than calling for closer economic integration.
In his New Year speech this January, Xi spoke warmly of the people of Taiwan as one family with the people of the mainland. Beijing insists that Taiwan has “always” been part of China, but “always” is an elastic proposition in Beijing’s historiography and on Taiwan, history is remembered very differently.
It did not become a province of China until 1887, and only eight years later it was ceded to Japan in perpetuity. The population strongly objected, and declared independence, only to be overwhelmed by Japanese forces. Both Mao and KMT leader Chiang argued that the island should be independent, once liberated from Japanese imperialism. But by the time Japan was defeated in 1945, both had changed their minds, and Taiwan was once again handed over without consultation, this time to the KMT government of China. The Taiwanese objected and were crushed.
In 1947, up to 28,000 Taiwanese were killed when the KMT savagely suppressed protests against government corruption. Chiang declared the island the “temporary capital” of the Republic of China in 1949 and Taiwan lived under a dictatorship until 1987, when other political forces, including the DPP, began to organise and Taiwan’s identity finally found political expression.
In 1992 the first full elections were held, and in 1996 the first presidential election took place. By 2000, the DPP had come to power, ending more than five decades of KMT rule. Today, surveys reveal that only 3 per cent of Taiwanese regard themselves as primarily Chinese.
For the KMT, a transplanted party with historic roots in the mainland, this poses a dilemma. Unification with the PRC is unpopular in democratic Taiwan, especially after Beijing brutally ended Hong Kong’s liberties with the national security law in 2020. The KMT has long abandoned its pretension to rule all of China but still seeks a close relationship with the mainland, which it says is essential to maintaining peace. The KMT argues that if Beijing thinks the Taiwan favours de jure independence, war will be inevitable.
Su Chi, a veteran KMT official who served as information minister and national security chief under KMT governments, told me that “the KMT is down and out”, but defended the party’s record of striking a balance between the US and China. “Taiwan is in the middle of three great powers—Japan, the People’s Republic of China and the United States. That is 45 per cent of global GDP,” he said. “If we get along with all three, our security is guaranteed, and we make a lot of money.”
He sees the DPP’s pro-US, anti-China position as dangerous and worries it could provoke Beijing to invade. “We don’t have to like China to get along, but even if we differ there is a need to communicate. Beijing thinks there is no hope of a peaceful discussion with the DPP and, at the same time, domestic opinion is pro-Taiwan identity…. Xi Jinping worries that independence will happen on his watch.”
Last year’s elections revealed that alongside a growing sense of Taiwanese identity, voters have more mundane concerns. Young voters in particular offer a list of complaints similar to their cohort elsewhere: the cost of housing, long work hours, job insecurity, low wages and poor prospects. Many young people I spoke to complained that the two main parties did not represent them: one highly educated young woman in her thirties confessed that she had never voted.
In Taipei, people suspect that the voters of Kinmen harbour a worrying enthusiasm for closer ties with China. In 2019, the pro-China For Public Good Party, which supported the bridge to the mainland, the economic zone and eventual unification, did well in Kinmen’s local elections. In December 2023, the party’s former deputy chairman and other members were charged with taking money from China to fabricate political opinion polling.
Discontent with the established parties was evident in last year’s elections, when an insurgent third party, the populist Taiwan People’s Party, won 30 per cent of the Kinmen vote. The DPP took the presidency but lost control of the legislature, and is now governing against an opposition majority that has already launched some aggressive moves, including cuts to Taiwan’s military budget and a new law that reduces the power of Taiwan’s Constitutional Court.
Taiwan’s democracy inhabits a difficult terrain: caught in the middle of China’s systemic competition with the US and bombarded by mis- and dis-information from the mainland that aims to discredit the democratic system, Taiwan’s politicians must simultaneously deal with the economic and political challenges that might be found in any democracy, and a complex set of geopolitical dangers.
Contact between Taiwan and China has shrunk almost to zero, something the DPP blames on Beijing but which the KMT blames on the governing party. Su Chi, the KMT veteran, claims there used to be up to 20 reliable back channels to China through which problems could be fixed, but today there are none. This makes it difficult to lower the temperature when problems arise, as they increasingly do.
China’s navy and coastguard vessels are more assertive than before, provoking responses from Taiwan in turn. China has declared that the Taiwan Strait is a domestic rather than international waterway and its incursions into Taiwanese waters seem calculated to make the government of Taiwan appear helpless. One scenario under which Beijing might test both Taiwan and Washington begins with the cutting of the cables linking Kinmen to Taiwan and ends with an order to Taipei to evacuate its forces. Subsequently showering Kinmen’s population with economic benefits could give Beijing a substantial propaganda victory.
Seizing a soft target like Kinmen would not be militarily decisive, but it would have a psychological effect on the people of Taiwan and call into question Taiwan’s defence capability. For Xi, it would be a low-cost victory that could give him a boost with nationalists at home.
Taiwan has reason to be nervous. Trump has shown little appetite for a fight, and his hostility to China may well not translate into the defence of Taiwan. China, which now has the world’s largest navy, is likely to test his reactions. A full-scale war remains unlikely, but taking Kinmen could prove to be a temptation that’s hard for Beijing to resist.
